In the weeks before he apparently left to fight with extremists in the Middle East, an 18-year-old Melbourne man seems to have been asking questions in internet forums about travelling on to Turkey and taking part in a Muslim pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.
Media have this week identified the so-called “white jihadi” whose photograph appeared in Isis propaganda last year as Jake Bilardi, from the northern Melbourne suburb of Craigieburn.
Fairfax Media has reported that Bilardi was a gifted student who dropped out of Craigieburn Secondary College last year after converting to Islam.
Bilardi appears to have posted questions on internet forums under a pseudonym that suggested he was preparing to leave the country and wanted to avoid booking a return ticket to Australia.
“I found that so people don’t overstay their visas you have to show that you have a return ticket in order to get the visa,” he wrote.
“My question is I plan to go to Turkey straight after Umrah so I plan to get a one-way ticket and then move on after Umrah, could I just show them the second ticket and get away with it?
“If you aren’t sure and you think there’s someone I could ask I’d very thankful. I live in Melbourne, Australia by the way.”
He also asked where he could get an outgoing passenger card before he got to the airport so he could avoid waiting in lines, suggesting he was inexperienced with international travel.
“People have told me I can get it at the check-in counters but I am going to check in online so I can avoid the lines,” he wrote seven months ago.
“Does anyone know where I can get one?”
He posted in the same online forum two years ago, when he was 16, that he felt like his home “wasn’t really my home”.
“It has gotten to the point where I it feels like I am on a movie set,” he wrote.
At around the same time, he asked whether children were allowed to “fight in jihad”.
“I do not mean the idiots that claim to be Muslims that are at war now but real jihad,” he posted.
“I know that under Islamic law women, children and the elderly should be protected during jihad but seeming as it is perfectly fine for a woman to take up arms but what does Islam say about child soldiers in jihad? Do Jihadis have to be of a certain age before they can fight?”
On Monday, the prime minister, Tony Abbott, told reporters in Perth that the government was about to about to begin “a very big campaign to try to counter the influence that the death cult has, particularly online, on vulnerable Australians”.
“Too many Australians, it seems, are being brainwashed online,” he said.
On Christmas Eve, Bilardi reportedly used Twitter under the name Abu Abdullah to reach out to Zaky Mallah, the first person charged with terrorism in Australia and who later was acquitted.
Mallah told the Daily Mail at the time: “What I think I have learned from his conversations on Twitter with me and others is that he is an Australian called Jake who used to live in Melbourne.”
The Australian reported on Tuesday that Twitter suspended Bilardi’s account overnight after he tweeted: “What we have in store for you dogs will make 9/11 look like child’s play.”
A man who used to attend the Hume Islamic Youth Centre in Melbourne, and who did not wish to be named, told Guardian Australia he saw Jake Bilardi at the centre “a couple of times”.
“What I can say is that he was very quiet, he didn’t really hang around anybody,” he said.
“My friends who go to the centre are shocked, we think he is wasting his life and that he has thrown his future away by doing this. It’s stupid.”
On Tuesday, the Herald Sun quoted Bilardi’s aunt Connie Bilardi as saying the teenager had struggled after losing his mother to cancer, and that she believed Isis had preyed on the teenager’s vulnerability.
Do you know more? melissa.davey@theguardian.com
