Australia stopped 4 ‘major’ terror plots since Bondi, didn’t inform public — report

Australian authorities have thwarted four “major” terror plots that were either imminent or in advanced planning stages since last December’s Bondi Beach massacre, but did not inform the public, The Australian reports.

In total, 16 schemes at various threat levels were stopped since the Bondi attack, in which Islamist terrorists opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration, killing 15 people.

The newspaper says authorities confirmed the matter only after being directly queried, raising questions about the lack of transparency.

The report says the first time the matter came up was when Mike Burgess, head of Australia’s domestic security body ASIO, noted in a statement commemorating the 9/11 attacks in America that 16 plots had been thwarted since Bondi.

Police eventually confirmed the four “major” plots to The Australian. Details on them and their targets were very limited. In one case, a 20-year-old man from West Australia was accused of planning to attack mosques, police and the state’s parliament. In a second, a 13-year-old from New South Wales was charged with creating a document “connected with terrorism” and possessing extremist materials. In the third, a 24-year-old from Queensland was accused of planning terror attacks. In the fourth, two teens aged 15 and 16 “allegedly accessed extremist material online.”

As to why authorities had not been more forthcoming with the information, a police spokeswoman explained that it often takes time to establish whether a threat was “major.”

Former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo says: “It’s really a matter for the prime minister and the [current home affairs] minister to make a statement, preferably to the parliament, laying out in very sombre, clinical terms how many serious, imminent attacks were foiled at the last moment, and their ­locations and intended targets.”