Man Haron Monis was convinced he was the object of a vendetta by customs officials to avenge the heavy jail sentence given to Schapelle Corby by an Indonesian court, a Sydney coronial inquest has heard.
Franklin Arguedas, a one-time lawyer for the Sydney siege gunman, said on Tuesday that beginning in 2004 Monis had sent numerous letters to customs and senior government officials, including the prime minister, arguing he was being targeted for “random” airport checks whenever he re-entered the country.
Arguedas told the inquest that Monis, then calling himself Michael Heyson Mavros, “drew a connection between his treatment and the treatment of [Schapelle] Corby and Abu Bakar Bashir”.
He compared the two-and-a-half year sentence given by Indonesian judges to Bashir, a mastermind of the Bali bombings, to the 20-year term given to the Australian drug smuggler Corby, believing that customs would look to get revenge by “wantonly targeting Muslim clerics with the intention to give them a hard time”, Arguedas said.
Letters sent on Monis’s behalf by Arguedas claimed he was being “psychologically tortured” by customs based on “the way our client looks”.
The inquest heard from John Valastros, a customs official who dealt with Monis at the time, who said security footage from the airport showed Monis “almost goading [officers] to come towards him”, shifting between queues, looking directly at officers as if to say “come and speak to me”.
He said Monis had once texted him: “I am preparing myself for protest in front of airport, I will chain my legs and hands, I hope God helps me in this movement which is for justice.”
Monis travelled frequently, including a one-day trip to New Zealand that Arguedas speculated had been intended “to bamboozle customs, to make people believe he was doing something”.
If he passed through customs and was not stopped, he would “complain that this showed weakness in their systems”, Arguedas said.
In March 2005 customs officials gave Monis a tour of the security system at Sydney airport to dispel his fears he was being targeted. Arguedas said Monis was “observant” during the meeting, but the idea he was at the centre of a government conspiracy continued “churning in his mind”.
He remained fixated on the idea and Arguedas said he would no longer represent the self-styled ayatollah. “Do you think I’m mad?” he said Monis asked him.
Arguedas answered that he should consider counselling, and Monis “got angry and told me not to speak to him like that. I could see the anger on his face.
“I just thought this guy wanted to be someone, he wanted to be a big person, and whenever he arrived [in the country] he didn’t want to have to clear immigration; he wanted to be treated like the prime minister.”
He said the Iranian refugee – who had refused to give his address, claiming “people are after me and [I] may be killed” – still owed him up to $1,500. He had also claimed to work as an agent of the Australian and US governments.
Still, Arguedas did not think the man was “psychologically damaged”.
“I don’t know whether I would have thought he was insane. That never entered my mind. I just thought he was a difficult person,” he said.
The inquest heard from a lawyer for Amnesty International, Catharine Wood, who met Monis in August 2010 to hear his complaints over death threats he was receiving for sending offensive letters to the families of dead soldiers.
Wood said that Monis, by this stage calling himself sheikh Haron, “didn’t look at me once”. Instead he addressed his answers to the male refugee caseworker who was present.
The inquest saw evidence of violent and racist emails Monis was receiving over his letters to soldiers, threatening to “spill [his] dirty blood in the streets”.
Another read: “You are a spineless insect, I will crush you like the bug you are.”
Wood said Monis was “standing on a soapbox, painting himself as a noble victim” and “very apparently had some mental health issues”.
Robert Mills oversaw Monis’ court ordered community service from April 2013 to April 2014 and described Monis arriving one day on a motorbike in a “Nazi-like” helmet. Mills said he was “very polite” in his first interview.
“Man was pretty lazy around the place, he didn’t do anything in a hurry, he was quite slow in what he did. Later on he told me he had a heart condition,” he said.
“When I did give him painting jobs he was very enthusiastic, he did a good job on that.”
Mills had Monis paint collection boxes for the school and then later asked him to paint some crosses for an ordination for cadets but Monis refused.
“He wasn’t aggressive or anything like that, I asked him to paint crosses that were going into ordination for cadets in town, we just needed them painted. He said: ‘Look Robert I don’t want to do that.’ I could tell the way he said that he had a reason for it and I assume that it probably was part of his beliefs. It offended or impinged on his beliefs so I didn’t [make him do it],” he said.
On Monday the inquest heard that Monis had been assessed in 2010 as suffering from schizophrenia, and had collapsed twice in the street after a “psychotic episode”. On Wednesday the inquest will hear from psychiatrists and mental health workers who dealt with Monis.
