TerrorismAustralians ponder whether Sydney siege could have been predicted and prevented

Authorities and security experts in Australia believe that better monitoring of Man Haron Monis’ activities, not counterterrorism measures, could have prevented the armed siege last week when Monis held seventeen people hostage at a Sydney cafe, killing two of them before police shot him dead. At the time of the incident, Monis was out on bail for a number of charges, including being an accessory to the murder of his former wife. In 2013 Monis had pleaded guilty to twelve charges of sending poison-pen letters to the families of Australian servicemen who were killed in Afghanistan. He was sentenced to two-year probation and 300 hours of community service, and had lost his appeal three days before he took people hostage at the Lindt Chocolate Cafe.

Earlier in April, Monis was charged with the sexual assault of a woman in western Sydney in 2002; forty more counts of sexual assault involving six other women were added to that case. The New York Times reports that in late 2013, Monis’ girlfriend, Amirzh Droudis, was charged with stabbing and burning to death Monis’ former wife. Monis was also charged with being an accessory before and after the fact in the murder.

Questions are now being raised over why Monis and Droudis were granted bail last December after their charges. Monis “had been of interest to our security agencies” but he was not on a government watch list, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said during a radio interview last Wednesday. “We want to know why he wasn’t being monitored. The system did not adequately deal with the individual, there is no doubt about that,” Abbott added.

Daryl Pearce, the magistrate who granted Monis and Droudis bail, said at the time of the trial that it was a “simple matter of fairness,” citing the prosecution’s weak case. On the murder of his former wife, Monis claimed he was framed by the Iranian secret service.

The Australian government introduced a series of laws earlier this year to counter calls by the Islamic State for lone wolf radicals to issue attacks on Australian soil. The laws made it an offense to advocate terrorism, barred Australians from joining militants fighting overseas, allowed Australian authorities to confiscate and revoke passports, and provided security and defense agencies a framework to share information. Security experts note that none of those measures could have stopped Monis. “The new laws don’t add anything to what can be done in advance in a situation like the siege,” said Bret Walker, a lawyer who was Australia’s first independent monitor for national security laws.

The Homeland Security News Wire reported yesterday that lone wolf terrorists are unlikely to catch the attention of counterterrorism agencies because they bypass the sophisticated planning deployed by most terrorist groups. Popular counterterrorism strategies, including communications surveillance, could do little to predict the actions of a lone wolf terrorist. “The attack package is a very low-grade effort,” said Raffaello Pantucci, the director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “You don’t tell anyone about it, and that makes it very difficult for intelligence agencies to pick these people up.”