In the six months since Man Haron Monis took staff and customers hostage in the Lindt cafe in Sydney, some cold, established facts have emerged. Among them: Monis entered the cafe after 8.30am on 15 December and had a piece of chocolate cake and some tea. Within half an hour he had the manager, Tori Johnson, ordering the doors be locked and Monis was pointing a sawn off shotgun at the customers and staff in the cafe.
Johnson was shot, without warning, in the head at almost point blank range after being made to kneel on the ground in the early hours of 16 December. Katrina Dawson, a barrister who worked nearby and had gone into the cafe for a drink as she did most working mornings, was killed by the fragments of police bullets when the building was stormed in the minutes after Johnson’s shooting.
Police fired 22 rounds. Monis fired two shots and was hit by at least 13 bullets.
The bleak, terrifying, horrific hours spent in the cafe have been filled in somewhat by interviews given by some of the hostages, mostly on television, but as the official inquest looms there is still much not known by the public.
The coronial inquest, which was established because of the deaths of two hostages, held a short hearing in January and is to reopen on Monday to examine every aspect of the siege and the way it was handled by authorities. Overseen by New South Wales coroner Michael Barnes, the inquest is being guided by Jeremy Gormly SC, counsel assisting the coroner, who has revealed there are many audio and video recordings from inside the cafe to shed more light on what happened.
All of the hostages have been called to give evidence and it will be the first time a few of them are heard from publicly. Eleven hostages escaped at different times and the inquest has not said how many remained in the cafe until the very end but it is believed to be seven. Rumours swirled and were reported by various media outlets that Dawson died protecting her pregnant friend and colleague Julie Taylor, but as yet there has been little evidence of this. Taylor released a statement in the days after the siege, praising the “bravery and strength” of her closest friend but has not spoken publicly about the hours she spent in the cafe.
The inquest will also hear from NSW police involved in the operation to try to free the hostages, and police from Britain and Queensland have worked together to give an assessment of the response. The police actions, in a very public, fraught standoff, will be under intense scrutiny as the inquiry ranges across the key questions.
The Sydney siege was an unusual, arguably unique media event, unfolding in front of a global audience. Instead of a brutal, quick attack that the world was left to react to, it was drawn out over almost 17 hours with people following a delicate police operation in real time on their television, their radios, online news sites and social media. Yet despite such a large audience playing witness, there is still much not known.
Were police right not to shoot? What, if anything, could they have done differently?
At 9.44am Monis ordered the doors of the cafe to be closed and two hostages to stand against the window. They raised a flag bearing the Shahada, which media outlets covering the siege live wrongly identified as an Islamic State flag. Police arrived on the scene within minutes after a woman who tried to enter the cafe raised the alarm when she saw Monis armed with a sawn off shotgun. Over the hours the area was shut down, surrounding buildings evacuated and police swarmed, creating a perimeter around the cafe, entering buildings which had windows that looked down on it and climbing on to roofs.
The NSW police tactical operations unit (TOU) was called in. Deputy Commissioner Catherine Burn ran the counter-terrorism operation under Task Force Pioneer, which was led by assistant commissioner Mark Murdoch, who reports to Burn.
At least one sniper gun was trained on Monis but the decision was made not to shoot. A full explanation of why the police did not shoot will be provided in the inquest. Police have previously told media they were not sure if Monis had explosives in his backpack and, because the Lindt cafe is in a former bank building, it was not clear if the windows were bullet proof and if so whether this could affect the bullet’s trajectory.
A plan was also made by police to storm the cafe hours before Monis shot Johnson, Fairfax Media has reported. However it was delayed. The police were forced to take action when Monis shot Johnson. The inquest has been warned police may not be able to reveal some aspects of their strategy and plan but the the management of the siege will be a central tenet of the inquest.
There have been questions about whether the army should have been brought in. The Special Forces counter-terrorism unit based at Holsworthy army barracks about an hour from the centre of Sydney, Tactical Assault Group – East (Tag-E), was not called in for the siege despite being trained specifically to deal with a domestic hostage situation.
The inquest is not going to be able to establish if fewer or more people would have died according to different courses of action, but it may change how police respond to future terrorist or terrorist-type events. Which brings us to the next fundamental question:
Was it a terrorist attack?
The Australian treasurer, Joe Hockey, declared the Martin Place siege a terrorist incident so businesses affected could claim insurance payouts. Although Monis had declared allegiance to Islamic State there is as yet no published evidence he had any contact with anyone in the organisation.
Monis has since been praised in Dabiq, an English language publication for Isis, but it serves the organisation’s purposes well to do so. If Monis is proved to be mentally unwell, and/or acting alone it will blur the boundaries within which a terrorist attack falls.
It is also unclear why Monis chose the Lindt cafe as the place to take hostages. He was sitting in there for 30 minutes before revealing his gun and it is yet to be publicly established why he chose that cafe. The cafe is just across the square from Channel Seven studios, which has a prominent view of the inside and outside, and it has been speculated Monis chose it because that would contribute to having maximum coverage and impact. Other reports have Monis trying to enter Channel Seven to undertake the siege but being stopped by security. There has also been speculation he chose it after media reports identified it as the location of a planned beheading, which has never been proven or officially confirmed.
Could Monis have been stopped before he entered the cafe?
In an age of increased surveillance and metadata collection the issue of whether spy and counter-terrorism agencies should have been watching Monis more closely will be raised at the inquest. Monis, an Iranian refugee granted asylum in 2001, had a website on which he had publicly declared his allegiance to the caliphate the week before the attack and had come to the attention of authorities on numerous occasions. In the days before the attack a separate review has found there had been 18 calls to the terrorist hotline about Monis’s posts to the website and social media but the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) found an attack was not imminent when reviewing the posts.
Monis waged a campaign for years, writing letters to the families of Australian soldiers who had died in Afghanistan, labelling them child killers and their corpses unclean.
However, it is still unclear if he had actually communicated with anyone about his plans which would make it almost impossible for any government agency to be aware of his intentions. The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has questioned why Monis was not on terrorist watch lists but the inquest will also examine whether this was actually the type of “lone wolf” attack various police and intelligence figures have said they were most concerned about.
Whether Monis should have been watched more closely is perhaps a secondary issue to another way he could have been prevented from being in the Lindt cafe last September. He could have been in jail.
Over the years Monis faced courts on a range of offences. His most recent charges were to do with the murder of his ex-wife, Noleen Hayson Pal, who was stabbed and set alight in April 2013. Monis was charged with being an accessory to the murder and also faced court last October on 22 sexual assault offences.
Despite being linked to such serious crimes, Monis walked away from court, bailed when a magistrate declared that while he was a threat to his ex-wife he was not a threat to the wider community.
Mental health assessments of Monis will also form part of the inquest and it will consider whether the management of his established mental health issues played an role in him undertaking the siege. It has been widely assumed Monis was at the very least unstable, and Abbott has described as having a “long history” of mental illness. But Monis refused a psychiatric assessment before last trial and any qualified assessment of his mental health is yet to be made public.
Sydney Shia leaders had apparently urged federal police to investigate his claim to be a leading cleric, while he was ignored by the Sunni community.
What role did social media have in the siege?
Monis made Westpac employees Marcia Mikhael and Selina Win Pe, Lindt cafe employee Joel Herat and Taylor appear in videos which were uploaded to Herat’s YouTube account and had at least two hostages post status updates on Facebook listing his demands which included an Isis flag and a phone call with Abbott, which Abbott was advised not to abide by.
The videos and Facebook posts were circulated on Twitter though the media, with the exception of Channel Ten, had held off on publishing his demands which had also been telephoned through to various newsrooms.
The counsel assisting the coroner has singled out Twitter and “its role in affecting the resolution of the siege” as to be examined in the inquest. Users around Australia and across the world logged on to Twitter to watch events unfold in real time and it was also one of the first places where Monis’s name was shared and victims were also slowly identified on the site.
There was concern on the day that photos being shared of police gave away their position and there has been constant speculation that Monis himself was on the social networking site at different stages of the siege.
