Lessons in Terror: the Lindt Café Siege and Brighton Attack

Janet Fife-Yeomans is Chief Reporter with the The Daily Telegraph, a best selling author and award winning journalist. In May 2017, Janet Fife-Yeomans wrote a series of articles for The Daily Telegraph forensically reviewing the findings of theCoroner’s Report into the Lindt Café siege in Sydney in December 2015. The coroner’s findings were tragic and exposed serious weaknesses in the police operation on the night of the siege and the NSW justice system, which Man Monis – the terrorist – had managed to get around, avoiding detention while awaiting a trial where he was accessory to murder. To further discuss the findings of the Coroner’s Report, Janet Fife-Yeomans addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 25 July 2017

 

LESSONS IN TERROR – THE LINDT CAFÉ SEIGE AND BRIGHTON ATTACK

 JANET FIFE-YEOMANS

 

All of you here tonight will have some familiarity with some parts of the Lindt Café siege, whether as part of your job or from newspaper and TV coverage. It would be easy with the familiarity of repetition and time to know the facts while forgetting the emotional impact of the unfolding events.

So, with that in mind, I want to try and put you inside the Lindt Café in what were the final fatal moments of the country’s first terrorist siege. The reason I have chosen to concentrate on those final few minutes is because they sum up the handling of the siege.

It was the best and worst of policing.

At 2.03am on Tuesday December 16, 2014, Man Monis fired his first shot after one of six escaping hostages knocked over a glass. Inside the café there were six hostages left. Two of them crawled behind one of the serving stations. Two, including Katrina Dawson, hid in the corner of the café between the foyer doors and Martin Place.

Louisa Hope, who was not prepared to leave her mother behind, was pulled up from the floor by her bra straps by Monis and put in front of him along with her mother as he used them as human shields. They were told to close their eyes and keep them shut.

Then Monis turned to the café manager Tori Johnson. “Come over here right now” and then ordered him, “Down, down, down on your knees” indicating with his head and a sawn-off shotgun where he wanted Tori to kneel. Tori’s knees were later found to have been bruised.

At the same time, Monis was scanning the front of the café from left to right as if waiting for the police to enter. At 2.11 am he fired the shotgun for the second time and Tori fell forward onto the floor with his hands still at his head. But Monis had fired towards the kitchen and Tori lifted himself up and kept kneeling.

One of the hostages, Selina Win Pe, heard Tori gasp: “Oh my God.”

Then Monis reached across his body and pulled out a fresh cartridge from the right pocket of his cargo pants. He loaded it into the shotgun and started to psych himself up with heavy breaths.

Louisa Hope described what happened next: “I can say that I did not hear any word from Tori. He was distressed but as time went on he stopped crying. He stopped being distressed. He had composed himself.”

At 2.13am with the end of the gun barrel just 75cm from the back of his head, Tori was shot dead. Katrina Dawson was hiding under the chair behind Monis when Tori was executed.

Outside the café, were the country’s toughest and best-trained police. But the Tactical Operations Unit officers had not been able to operate, the snipers couldn’t snipe and the negotiators had not been able to negotiate.

After that third shot, in the old Westpac building on the other side of Martin Place, the lead sniper Sierra 3.1 radioed: “Sierra…white window 2…hostage down.” His call was echoed by the sniper in the Channel 7 building opposite the café.

A hostage was dead. That was the trigger for the police to storm the café under their so-called Emergency Action plan. The EA.

For over 15 hours, the TOU officers with Alpha Team wearing 25 kilos of uniform in the December heat, had been waiting along Phillip Street out of sight of the café. They had been itching to go in. This is what they had trained for.

The tactical commander radioed to them: “Echo Alpha this is Tango Charlie. Commit the EA” followed by the code.

No-one moved.

The broadcast had failed.

His deputy took over and shortened the command: “All teams commit the EA” and repeated the code word three times.

But the ballistic shield man who would lead the Alpha team still didn’t hear the order. His radio hadn’t worked all day and there had been no replacements. The order had to be relayed to him by a fellow officer.

You all know what happened next.

The TOU stormed the café, killed Monis, found Tori’s body and Katrina Dawson could not be saved after being hit by fragments of police bullets.

The state coroner spent months investigating the police response to the siege and the background of Monis, who should never have been in the country in the first place. Never has a police operation come under such scrutiny. The coroner’s report runs to 472 pages. I can’t come near to examining it all in half an hour. 

The bravery of those officers standing in Martin Place can never be questioned. They went into the café aware that if Monis really did have a bomb as he claimed, they would all probably die. But they went in nevertheless.

Yet it can be argued that the politics and police bureaucracy behind the scenes may have cost lives.

Those of us reporting on the inquest were fortunate to be in a separate media room watching proceedings on a big screen. Initially we wanted to be in the courtroom, part of the action. But being in our own room allowed us to express our frustration, amazement and anger at what we heard – without being thrown out of the court. There were times we looked at each other and said: “Did they really say that?”

There were also a couple of very good mimics among the reporters who could take off certain of the lawyers in court. I wish I could demonstrate that here but it would be immediately obvious to those involved who I meant.

None of the reporters were experts in policing or terrorism but we have certainly sat in our share of court cases and inquests. Some of the evidence we heard literally made our jaws drop, none more so than the fact that one of the hostages had to be murdered before police would move to save the rest.

Should the police have stormed the café earlier? Certainly, at least after the first shot was fired. Would the outcome have been different? Yes. Would all of the hostages have been saved? Perhaps, perhaps not.

It is easy to say that police were always going to be criticised…damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. If they had gone in and Monis had a bomb we would all be here smashing them for going in too quickly instead of waiting.

But ­hope is not a plan.

That is what is drummed into those counter-terrorism officers all the time – hope is not a plan.

But hope in the end was all they had. Hope that Monis would walk outside the café and surrender peacefully.

The snipers couldn’t snipe until someone died or was in imminent danger because they would leave themselves open to be charged with murder. They had no more protection than you or me in the street. They are trained to hit a target the size of a dollar coin from 100 metres but the only time they had Monis in their sights was for 10 minutes from 7.38pm on the Monday. The rest of the time he was behind pillars in the cafe.

Plus, the sniper with the best view who was in the old Westpac building couldn’t have fired at all because even with the armour-piercing ammunition he had, the round would not have reached the café.  Tests conducted afterwards showed that because the Westpac glass was insulated, double-glazed and 30mm thick, the ammunition immediately fragmented. No shot would have reached the café. It was concluded that breaking the glass first would have been so noisy it would have alerted Monis. 

They now have some new method to get through the glass but what it is remains secret.

The understaffed and under resourced negotiation unit didn’t negotiate because Monis refused to speak to them. The inquest heard how they missed chances to secure something from Monis in return for giving in to his demands, however minor. At 12.28 pm, police moved back some officers from near the café after a demand by Monis. Around 30 minutes later they moved cars back after another demand by Monis. But they asked for nothing in return.

The only officer open to making a deal with the gunman if they could get even some of the hostages out was Mick Fuller, now the police commissioner. Within five minutes of the Triple O operator sending out the alarm, he had taken control as the first overall commander. Two minutes later he called out the Tactical Operations Unit.

One of the demands made by Monis was to talk to ABC radio. Fuller thought it worthwhile considering letting him talk to the ABC in return for releasing half the hostages. He gave the green light to negotiators to discuss this deal with the gunman. But the head of the negotiators – there were only two fulltime negotiators in the state – thought it was the wrong thing to do because it was against the government’s policy of not making concessions to terrorists.

He thought it may have been catastrophic because Monis could have used the radio to send messages to accomplices. He thought the deal was not worth it.

The message was not passed on.

Meanwhile the Tactical Operations Unit was left without any tactics. Basically they had two options – the EA or Emergency Action plan which would be triggered by the death of a hostage. That was drawn up immediately. The other option was a Deliberate or Direct Action plan, a DA, under which police would assault the café at a time of their choosing to take Monis by surprise.

This was the TOU’s preferred option and a DA plan was drawn up. TOU commanders looked at the plan and thought it would work and at about 10.45pm, the Australian Defence Force told the police that members of its Tactical Assault Group had conducted a run through of the DA plan using a mock-up of the café and it was “tactically feasible”. Once the plan was approved, it would still require an order to put it into action, it was not automatic.

It was never approved.

The overall police commanders felt the possibility of Monis having a bomb too great a risk to take.

So when Monis fired his first shot at 2.03 am, the police had backed themselves into a corner. They had no option but to wait until someone was killed.

Less than two weeks after state coroner Michael Barnes handed down his findings, there was another terrorist siege. This time in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton. The gunman, Yacob Khayre, was very different from Man Monis but at the same time there were similarities. Both of them came seemingly from nowhere to kill.

But they were both known to police, they had both faced court on terrorist-related offences, both had connections to extremists, they had both been written off as not being particularly dangerous. Monis was on bail over the murder of his wife and a string of sexual assaults, Khayre was on parole for aggravated robbery and theft offences and the Victorian parole board had taken into account the fact that he had been acquitted of planning a massacre at Holsworthy Army Barracks in 2009.

The siege in Melbourne showed how Islamic State is constantly updating its tactics. The same online IS magazine that suggested stabbing and the use of trucks to mow people down – which has been used to such devastation in Europe – had called in its latest edition for followers to use classified ad sites like Gumtree to lure people to meetings, restrain them and hold them hostage to lure police into an ambush.

Yacob Khayre did just that.

He posed as a client to hire a prostitute to meet him at The Buckingham serviced apartments from where he rang Channel 7 and said: “This is for IS, this is for Al-Qaeda”. When police arrived, he burst from the apartment and opened fire. He was shot dead.

In NSW with the Lindt Café siege, a review of procedures roared through the police even before the coroner’s findings were handed down.

At first you read those findings thinking, well, that was quite timid report. But when you drilled down into it, you realised the coroner didn’t miss anything. He was very clever the way he used subtle language to tear the police operation apart without laying blame at any one individual.

If – or when – there is a second terrorist siege in the state, it will be handled completely differently. While you can argue that every siege, every incident, is different, the next such attack will be met with more courageous tactics.  Police commissioner Mick Fuller has said he would probably have ordered the storming of the café after the first shot.

Significantly the coroner found that the police negotiators relied too much on the advice of their regular psychiatrist, who thought Monis was “grandstanding”. He no longer works with the police.

The coroner found that the snipers would have been “lawfully justified” in shooting Monis from soon after the siege began and their locations were as good as they could get. The laws have been changed to give the police clear protections to shoot to kill terrorists.

It was interesting to see the federal moves to change the laws so troops can more easily and be called into help police in situations like the Lindt siege. There has been a lot of talk about the army’s “elite” troops. Well, the NSW Police Tactical Operations Unit, the guys at the siege, already train alongside their counterparts in the army.

All the police experts from the UK and the coroner himself said that the state police could handle the Lindt siege.

It would have been different if Monis had accomplices when the army may have been called in. But while using the army sounds great, if they kill someone are they going to do a blood and alcohol test? Hand their weapons over for ballistic testing? Participate in a police interview? Attend an inquest and give evidence? No way. They can’t be forced to.

Now we are moving towards a broad home affairs portfolio, something that has been on the cards since 9/11 when it was proposed by Kim Beazley, who was then the Labor leader. It makes sense. The Lindt inquest demonstrated how crucial information was not shared. The hearings involving ASIO’s involvement were held in secret but Coroner Barnes found there was information that should have been shared by ASIO with the police.

He referred to “gaps and shortcomings” that could have a real impact on future assessments of the risk of politically motivated violence.

Having said that, we should not underestimate the knowledge that our elite agencies have. The SAS for example. Although they can’t operate on home soil, the SAS closely monitors terrorism around the world and at home as it affects Australia.

Returning to the final moments of the siege. One person I know who has been closely involved with the SAS told me: “Every time there is a door to walk through, everything behind it is unknown. It can be anticipated but it is unknown.”

Which could also be a philosophy for life, I guess.