The Sydney suspect: A self-styled sheik with an infamous past - The Globe and MailThe Sydney suspect: A self-styled sheik with an infamous past - The Globe and Mail










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Man Haron Monis, the self-styled Muslim cleric accused of sending offending letters to the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, attends the Khilafah “Uprising in the Muslim World” conference in Sydney in July, 2011. (DEAN LEWINS/EPA)







Man Haron Monis, the self-styled Muslim cleric accused of sending offending letters to the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, attends the Khilafah “Uprising in the Muslim World” conference in Sydney in July, 2011.(DEAN LEWINS/EPA)



The Sydney suspect: A self-styled sheik with an infamous past
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TU THANH HA


The Globe and Mail

Published
Monday, Dec. 15 2014, 11:32 AM EST

Last updated
Monday, Dec. 15 2014, 8:36 PM EST










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Man Haron Monis had a long history of trouble with the law
in Australia but one demand he made after taking 17 people hostages in a Sydney
café illustrates that he was a lone amateur who
just latched onto the violent Islamist movement.Mr. Monis only
had a generic Islamic flag to display in the window of the Lindt coffee shop in Sydney. One of the demands he
forced hostages to state on video was for authorities to provide him with a
proper flag of the Islamic State group.






Reuters Dec. 15 2014, 9:38 AM EST
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A 50-year-old political refugee from Iran, Mr. Monis called himself Sheik Haron or Ayatollah Manteghi Boroujerdi, even though community representatives
said he was not a legitimate religious leader.Last spring, he had been charged with the indecent and sexual assault of a
woman who had visited a Sydney clinic he ran as a “spiritual healer.” By the
fall, the charges had been upgraded to include an additional 22 counts of
aggravated sexual assault and 14 counts of aggravated indecent assault relating
to six other women.A criminal lawyer who represented him said Mr. Monis might become desperate as his judicial
problems accumulated. “I think he might consider that he [had] nothing to lose,”
said Manny Conditsis.Mr. Conditsis
represented Mr. Monis when
the latter was charged in November, 2013, with being an accessory to the murder
of his ex-wife, who had been stabbed 18 times and set on fire in a
stairwell.A magistrate granted bail to Mr. Monis as
“simple matter of fairness” after noting that the prosecution had “a weak case”
against him.Mr. Monis was “a
damaged-goods individual,” Mr. Conditsis
told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He added that “this is a one-off,
random individual. It’s not a concerted terrorist event.”Still, his behaviour mirrored the actions of men such as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the shooter who attacked the
Canadian Parliament in October, and Martin Rouleau-Couture, who ran over an Air Force warrant
officer in a parking lot near St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que. – troubled misfits who
embraced the call for jihad as their lives were unravelling.The Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee warned in a report last
year that places of mass gathering were “attractive targets for religious and
political extremists, as well as disgruntled or mentally impaired
individuals.”Islamic State has egged on those kind of individuals before. In an audio
recording last month, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called on followers to “erupt
volcanoes of jihad everywhere.”The same message appeared in Dabiq, the
IS English-language magazine, which in October praised the Ottawa and Quebec
attacks, as well as the actions of Numan Haider, an Australian terrorism suspect who was
shot dead in September as he stabbed two police officers.Mr. Monis
already had been convicted in 2013 of sending offensive letters to the families
of seven Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. He was sentenced to 300
hours of community service.On his website, he claimed that the charges were part of a political vendetta
against him.He also sent an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Abbott in November, 2013,
warning that “Australia and Australians will be attacked” if the country carried
on with its foreign policies.Though he comes from a country where most are Shia Muslims, Mr. Monis claimed allegiance to Sunni Islam. “I used
to be a Rafidi, but
not anymore,” he
wrote on his website earlier this month, choosing a pejorative term used by
orthodox Sunnis to describe Shiites.





 



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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
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