POLICE TAPE PODCAST Islamic

POLICE TAPE PODCAST Islamic extremism threat to Australia increasing despite ISIS demise, says Peter Moroney Anyone who doesn’t think Australia has a problem with Islamic-based terrorism is a fool, with an increase in incidents making it ever more likely that “one of those threats will get through”, says a former counter terror specialist. Charles Miranda, News Corp Australia Network May 15, 2019 7:30pm THE threat of Islamic-based terrorism in Australia had not lessened, with the demise of Islamic State doing little to dissuade “the 100” who hate this country and way of life, one of the nation’s former top counter terrorist cops has warned. In True Crime Australia’s explosive new Police Tape podcast, Peter Moroney reveals terrorist sleeper cells still exist in our suburbs and are still dreaming up ways to express their hate, such as the plot thwarted by Operation Pendennis — the country’s largest ever foiled attack that saw more than a dozen men from Sydney and Melbourne jailed. The former NSW Police detective sergeant was one of the NSW leads in the multi-agency Pendennis, which also involved ASIO, the Australian Federal Police and Victoria Police, and centred on the jihadi directions of Melbourne’s self-styled cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika. Suburban shooting: How Strathfield massacre gave rise to terror cop’s career Moroney said Pendennis — which uncovered a plot for mass killings in Victoria and NSW, including a 2003 waterborne attack on New Year’s Eve on Sydney Harbour — showed Australia could no longer imagine an American 9/11 could not happen here. “We’ve been very fortunate in this country for a long time, and I sincerely hope that continues, but we are a target, we have people in our community that hate Australia and Australians,” he said. “They might live here, but they don’t like us and they don’t like our way of life … nothing has changed.” Moroney said at around the 2005 Pendennis convictions, 100 people were being looked at as needing deradicalisation. Fourteen years later, no-one should be fooled into thinking they were somehow now safe, as sleeper cells existed today, he said. Peter Moroney says it would be foolish to dismiss the threat of Islamic-based terrorism in Australia. Picture: Tim Hunter. “There is nothing in the world that has changed significantly for even the 100-plus people that we were targeting, back in the day, to be deradicalised,” he said. “If someone sat here, in this day and age, and said that we don’t (have a problem), I think you’re a fool. You’ve got to look at what is occurring … on facts and statistics alone the number of terrorism-based incidents in this country has increased and a lot of those are Islamic-based terrorist incidences. “If people in this country think that there’s not Islamic fundamentalists that are here that would like to cause harm, they are severely mistaken.” NSW Counter Terrorism Minister Anthony Roberts declined to comment specifically on the issue, but said the national threat level being at “high” and a terror event rated “probable” summed it up. “But what we can’t allow with individuals or groups overseas to do is to divide our society and pitch one group against another … I don’t want to shine too much light on a very, very potential small section of the population when you have the great majority, 99.9 per cent of the population, that love this country no matter their background, religion or political beliefs,” he said. Moroney said it had to be called out that, in the past 12 years, almost all terrorist attacks had been Islamic- based, but there were enough law enforcement, intelligence and military agencies working to thwart them. “Will that mean we won’t have an attack? I can’t predict that at all, and I always default to that IRA saying that says, ‘We only need to be lucky once, you need to be lucky on all occasions’. “Getting back to the basics, the Islamic threat in this country is increased, the statistics will tell you that the more a threat increases the more likelihood there will be that one of those threats will get through, and that’s not from a sensationalism point of view at all.” Moroney added: “I’ve copped a number of people saying, ‘Why do I always talk about Islamic-based terrorism’, at this point in time that is our fundamental area of concern. “Let’s call it as it is, all of the arrests and the incidents that have occurred in the last dozen plus years are Islamic-based terrorism.” Moroney joined NSW’s then newly-formed counter-terrorism unit in 2003 and, through one target, had by 2004 identified a nest of a dozen core suspected terrorists in NSW who had amassed bomb making materials. A linked second extremist cell of 17 men was uncovered in Melbourne, where 12 would eventually be charged with 27 terror-related offences. Between 2004 and November 2005, 16,400 hours of secret bug recordings were made and 98,000 telephone intercepts. .

Load more