Police investigates potential antisemitic terror plot

Published Jan 30, 2025, 1:14 AM

Sydney narrowly avoided a "mass casualty event" when police found a caravan with explosives and Jewish target addresses. The plot could have been one of Australia's worst terror attacks.

For more, former New South Wales Police Detective & Terror Investigator Peter Moroney joins.

The gravity of this situation cannot be understated. Sydney has narrowly avoided a potential mass casualty event after police discovered a caravan packed with explosives and the addresses of several Jewish targets across the city. The plot, if executed, could have resulted in one of the worst terror attacks to ever take place on Australian soil. Former New South Wales police detective and terror investigator Peter Moroney joins US Life, good morning to you, explain to us how much damage that caravan full of explosives could have inflicted.

Look, if you think about it in terms of it was positioned, Let's say in George Street, Sydney, where we have a large number of pedestrian pedestrians walking around. Depending on the size of the caravans, Clearly, from the volume of explosives that have been reported, the casualties would have to intend, depending on the time of the day it was detonated, would be into the thousands, if not the tens of thousands. And then you've got to extrapolate that over to property damage, building damage then and so on, and that doesn't then take into a play. That's the physical side of the House. But now we've got to deal with the mental anguish and the mental issues and mental health issues that are going to come with such an incident.

How does someone get their hands on that much firepower without raising an alarm?

I understand it was from the press conference of Deputy Commissioner Huts and the gel's been traced back to a mind where it was stolen. Now when it was actually stolen hasn't been released, but they will certainly that is the Police Strike Force will certainly revisit that. They'll go back over that. There are mandatory conditions around the reporting of such items, so that will be one of the avenues that the police are certainly going to pursue and a dedicated team will pursue that as explosives and trying to at least track them and trace them as far as we know. As we said, we don't know if they was stolen let's say twelve months ago. If they were, we've got a black hole of information for twelve months, which adds to the difficulty for the police.

Okay, so this was discovered on January nineteen, where many days pass that now and we understand it was only released yesterday because it was leaked to a newspaper. As a former detective, can you explain to us why it wouldn't have been released to the public this information, or at least why they wouldn't have told the Jewish community. Yeah.

Sure, now, look it does and I know it sounds unfathomable from a person's point of view. I've been involved in many terrorism operations on and around ears Ease where we've had threats and they're considered real threats, and the police will put in place any number of resources that the public won't generally see. One of the reasons that the information wasn't made public is that the police are trying to identify who's responsible. They've got a far better chance of succeeding that if the criminals or the criminal syndicate that's at play doesn't know what the police know. They don't know what's been seized, they don't know when it was seized. So I can certainly understand that level of covertness, and it's not an unusual tactic. I think what the public should take from it, and certainly from my experience with cauniterrorism matters, and particularly when the threat level is reached at a certain threshold, then preservation of life becomes the utmost and the police if they believed there were certain figures, and I certainly can't speak for the police what I know from their methodology. If the threat hit a certain level, the public certainly would have been informed without a doubt, right so I could have put more lives in danger if that actually made it public.

Thank you very much, We appreciate your insight. Peter Pleasure and the new South Wales Premier Chris Means will join us Live very soon for more on that van bomb plot.

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