Already and this is this is the Daily OS. This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the thirty first of January.
I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
On Wednesday evening, New South Wales Premier Chris Mins and police announced that a caravan full of explosives had been found in northwest Sydney. At the press conference, Mins indicated the explosives were intended to be used in an anti Semitic attack, with multiple sources now reporting a note found inside the caravan contained a list of addresses of Jewish people and synagogues.
So, Zara, usually when we talk about an incident like this, it's because it's happened in the last twenty four forty eight hours. That's not the case with this story though, right.
Now, that's not what's happened. So let me just explain what we know about this incident. So on Wednesday, as I said, New South Wales Police announced that a caravan filled with explosives had been found in Dural. Now that's a suburb in Sydney's out of northwest. What happened was a local resident saw this caravan parked in what they described as a hazardous position, and so they moved that van. They towed it to their property, and that was on
the nineteenth of January, so that's over ten days ago. Now. When the resident looked inside the van once it was on their property, they were very alarmed to see that there were explosives inside and it was at that point,
on the nineteenth of January that they called police. The explosives are believed to have been obtained from a mining site, and when police were first running through this incident, they were trying to explain how serious this was and the harm that could have been caused had this explosion actually occurred. So what police said was that these explosives were capable of blasts up to forty meters in diameter, and the premiere added that this could have caused a mass casualty event.
So we're not talking about something small here. We're talking about a van full of explosives. Had they been detonated, we could have seen a significant loss of life. Now, as I said at the top, police are investigating whether the caravan was going to be used in a targeted anti Semitic attack.
And that's all because of the Noche that is being reported as being found in the caravan.
Right, yes, so police themselves in the press conferences. There have been now two press conferences where they've spoken about this incident. They haven't explicitly spoken about this note, but it has been described by a number of media outlets, including the Daily Telegraph, who had all of the details
about this incident leaked to them. Now, all of these reports cite a police source who said a note was found inside the caravan that had the addresses of Jewish community members and of a synagogue, and a synagogue is a place of worship within Judaism. Now, as I said, police haven't publicly verified this report, and we also don't know the name of the synagogue that was written on
the note. What we have heard from Chris Mins is that he says those behind the alleged planned attack were bad people with bad ideologies, bad morals and bad ethics.
So this all happens ten days ago, but we're only finding out about it now, which is quite unusual for something like this. What do we know about what has actually happens during this ten day period.
So we know that there's been an investigation ongoing during that time. We know that the owner of the van is already in custody, but interestingly they're in custody over unrelated charges, so they haven't been arrested in connection to this specific incident. However, they were already in custody and are now being linked to this plot, so that person's been arrested. Deputy Police Commissioner David Hudson said arrests have
been made on the periphery of the investigation. When pressed, he didn't really elaborate, but from that we can just understand that perhaps not the master or the central suspects, but people peripherally connected to the case. Hudson said that more than one hundred police officers are now part of the investigation, that includes counter terrorism offices, national security agents from Asia, and police from Victoria and Queensland, as well
as of course from New South Wales. Again, this just goes to the heart of how severe and how significant this plot was.
I'm really interested in this idea that the public wasn't told about the discovery of the explosives until ten days after the fact. Has that been coming up as a talking point after this.
Yeah, that's been a really dominant talking point. I do just want to clarify, the only reason that we the public know that something happened is because, as I said, the information was leaked to the media, to the Daily Telegraph. This was not meant to be made public at the time that it was. That press conference that I referred to earlier of Chrismins and the Assistant Police Commissioner getting up and talking about this that was a lit minute thing.
That was only after the Daily Telegraph had published that exclusive story about this incident, and then when there was all of this media attention, they had no choice but to get up and to explain what had happened, or at least what they knew about what had happened. Now, there are kind of two perspectives on this story, so I'm going to highlight first what the response from some Jewish community groups has been to this as the group that was allegedly going to be targeted in this attack
had it taken place. We heard yesterday from the Executive Council of Australia Jury co CEO Peter Wertheim, and he's of the belief that the Jewish community should have known about this threat much earlier than they did. He said, I think they should have told us earlier because the impact on the community then could have been managed, we could have understood better what we are facing. There are sometimes very good operational reasons for keeping an investigation secret,
but that has to be balanced against other considerations. So there, he's really talking about the fact that the Jewish community finding out, or at Leastwish community leaders finding out about this at the same time as everyone else did, meant that they didn't have the answers when concerned community members were asking them, or you know, no one really knew anything.
The other argument that's been made here is that a lot of Jewish community members who regularly attend synagogue feel like they should have known if there was going to be an active threat made against them, and that knowledge of this incident might have changed their behaviors and whether or not they attended synagogue for example, last weekend.
Okay, so that's a bit of a snapshot of how Jewish community groups and members feel about the delay and the release of information. Then, on the other side of things, you have the new South Wales police rationale though.
Yeah, exactly so. Essentially the rationale provided by police is that this investigation was kept secret for a reason and that this information was withheld in order to successfully execute
this investigation. So we heard yesterday from Police Commissioner Karen Webb who said that now that that information has been made public and now that we are talking about this, she believes that part of the investigation has been compromised, so that has materially affected the investigation and specifically, she said it's been detrimental to some of the strategies police
may have used otherwise. Now, in terms of the investigation itself, whether or not it's compromised is a matter for police, but they haven't officially declared the event as a terrorist incident yet. Now this is a legal term in New South Wales. Once an incident is classified as terrorism, police have the power to search people and properties without a warrant within a certain number of days and within certain areas.
That said, while there hasn't been this formal classification at the time of recording, Chris Mins has described the incident as terrorism very clearly, and the Prime Minister, Anthony Alberizi has also told ABC Radio that he agrees that this is terrorism.
So this investigation is ongoing. We have people of interest early on police radar, some in custody, some not have police said anything about the ongoing threats to not just the Jewish community but the wider community.
Yeah. So police were very clear, very explicit. At the beginning of the press conference, they said there is no ongoing threat to the community, the broader Australian community that is in relation to this specific incident. However, it would be remiss of us not to mention this latest incident in the context of a broader spike in anti Semitic incidents and violence that we've seen across not just New
South Wales but also Victoria in recent months. Within just twelve hours of the announcement of this caravan, anti Semitic graffiti was discovered in three parts of Sydney's East. In Maruba, there was anti Semitic graffiti sprayed on Mount Sinai, which is a Jewish primary school, and that school begins classes
for the year this week. And a lot of what Chris Minds was saying yesterday morning about this was that there are going to be students walk looking in to school, primary school students who are seeing you know, profanities and
deeply offensive hate speech written on their school walls. It's also important tonight that Mount Sinai is near a childcare center that was firebombed earlier this month, so there is also a geographical element to the fact that a number of these incidents have now happened in the same area.
This is obviously a series of very shocking events, and I think I want to end this podcast by talking about the Jewish community's response to this. You took me through the comments made by one of the Jewish community leaders about whether he felt that the Jewish community should have known or not in this ten day period, but I want to go back to some of the comments he said about the impact of this event on the community. I mean, Chrismin said that this could have been a
mass casualty event. It marks a severe escalation in the state of anti Semitism, particularly in Sydney. How has the Jewish community responded.
I think that it's fair to say there's a lot of different emotions. Obviously, no one group is homogeneous, and I wouldn't want to ever speak for an entire community here, but I think what Peter Wertheim was describing in this press conference was that there's a lot of concern, there's a lot of fear, and there's also a lot of anger that this is happening at the rate and the frequency that it is. So here's a bit from that press conference.
We're angry because we are seeing that the Australia that we have been fortunate enough to live in ourselves, a land of freedom, fair mindedness, civilized norms of behavior and the rule of law, is starting to slip away from us.
Let's end quickly on just a quick reaction from the Australian political spectrum. Take me through the sense that you get from both sides of policies here.
Well, I mean pretty universal condemnation. The same type of language is being used, you know, horror, shock, things of that nature. The coalition is really questioning the delay in making that information public. There are Jewish MPs from both major parties. So Julian Lisa, who is a Liberal MP whose electorate covers Dural where the caravan was found, he
said that he was deeply disturbed by the reports. And on the other side of politics, Josh Burns, Labor MP in the seat of McNamara, he called the threat extremely, extremely frightening. So I think, yeah, a lot of that same language being used there by the political leaders as well as community leaders.
I think it has to be said that there's a lot that we don't know about this investigation, as repeated numerous times by New South Wales' Premier Chrismins and the police officials that we've heard from in the last forty eight hours. Zarah, thank you for that update on what we know so far, and thank you for joining us on a zlios this morning. It's been a huge week of news. Thank you for coming along for it. We'll be back this afternoon with some headlines and then a
good news episode tomorrow morning. My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Argodin woman from Gadighl Country.
The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torrestrate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.