A senior Australian federal police officer who was stabbed multiple times by the 18-year-old terror suspect Numan Haider has told a Victorian coroner that he was sure Haider would slit his throat and cut his head off, and that the officer who shot and killed Haider “saved my life”.
The officer, who was with the joint counter-terrorism unit and who was identified only as “officer B”, told the coroner, John Olle, that he and his colleague, “officer A”, approached Haider in the car park of the Endeavour Hills police station on the evening of 23 September 2014.
After introducing themselves and shaking Haider’s hand, officer A asked Haider to empty his pockets, while officer B said he was looking through the windows of Haider’s car, and that it was dark on the side of the car he was on.
“The next thing I heard was a yell,” officer B said.
“I looked up away from inside of the car and all I saw was Haider, I could not see officer A.” Officer B told Olle that he could also see a knife blade.
“In a split second, he [Haider] was on me,” officer B said. “I can’t even say how he got to me. I didn’t even have any audio perception of the incident, I just shut down. I just had no audio at all. It was kind of surreal. At the time he was on me, I didn’t even know I was stabbed or slashed.
“My eye was bleeding heavily and I felt blood running down my face. I did not feel any pain.”
Officer B said he reached for his gun, but he could not get it to release from his holster. He still could not hear. As he lay on the ground, officer B said a fatwa issued by the spiritual leader of Isis days before flashed into his mind. That fatwa, circulated among counter-terrorism police, urged Isis followers to attack and behead Australian police and military personnel.
“All of that went through my mind while I was on the ground,” officer B said.
He said his auditory senses suddenly returned to him when he heard the sound of a gunshot. Haider, who had been on top officer B stabbing him, fell to the ground next to him, officer B said.
“I thought, ‘he must be dead’,” he said. “It was at this point I realised I had been stabbed.”
He said he heard officer A, who had instantly killed Haider after shooting him once in the head, asking him if he was OK. He said he was unaware at that point that officer A had also been stabbed by Haider.
“I’m sure that Haider would have cut my throat and cut my head off,” officer B told Olle. “Officer A certainly saved my life.”
Officer B said he got up and ran inside the police station to call for an ambulance, blood flowing from his wounds. He said as other officers grabbed towels to press to his wounds he realised he had also been stabbed in the shoulder, which is when the pain hit him.
He was taken to the Alfred Hospital for treatment, where doctors told him that a stab wound to the centre of his chest below his sternum had left him with liver damage. Two stab wounds to his left shoulder had sliced the muscle in half and he required a shoulder reconstruction. There were two long lacerations to his face, one along his left eye and the other down his face, which had left him with scarring, officer B said. He remains on medications for pain management.
The coroner heard that joint counter-terrorism unit police had arranged the meeting with Haider not to arrest him or to charge him, but to build a relationship with him and better understand his motivations for carrying a shahada flag through the Dandenong shopping centre several days before. It was to be a “casual conversation”, officer B said.
On the day he and officer A were stabbed, officers from the unit, including officer B, had met with Haider’s parents at their home and shared details of the Dandenong plaza incident with them. But Haider was not home, so police rang him and asked him to come to the Endeavour Hills police station later that day to talk to them.
When Haider arrived at the station, he rang the officers to tell them he was there and officer A agreed to meet with him outside in the car park. At the time, officer B said he was not aware of any specific threat Haider had made against police or the Australian public. But there were concerns that he had recently started associating with people older than him who held extremist views.
Had intelligence from Asio been passed on to him and the other counter-terrorism officers that Haider had been posting violent and crude remarks about police and intelligence officers on his Facebook page, different arrangements would have been made, officer B said.
Officer B said Asio intelligence that Haider had threatened to stab police officers with a knife had also not been passed on to him.
“Knowing about the knife, it certainly would have given us more concern,” officer B said. “Different planning would have taken place. Instead of the two of us approaching him, four of us might have gone out with two staying back. There’s a number of options that could have been undertaken, and certainly a greater risk assessment in approaching him [would have been carried out].”
The inquest continues.
