An alleged plan to attack a Sydney synagogue using a trailer
packed with explosives was fabricated by an organized crime network in order to
divert police resources, Australian authorities said Monday.
Police in January found explosives in a trailer, or caravan,
that could have created a blast wave of 40 meters (130 feet), along with the
address of a Sydney synagogue.
But officers said Monday that the discovery was part of a
“criminal con job.” The ease with which the trailer was found along with the
lack of a detonator suggests there was never any intention to attack Jewish
targets.
“The caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event
but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal
benefit,” Krissy Barrett, the Australian Federal Police’s deputy commissioner
for national security, told a news conference.
“Almost immediately, experienced investigators… believed
that the caravan was part of a fabricated terrorism plot – essentially a
criminal con job,” she said.
Out of an “abundance of caution,” police followed up
terrorism-related tipoffs over the purported plot rather than making public
their belief that the information was fake, Barrett said.
Organized criminals in Australia and offshore contrived the
scheme, she said.
“Put simply, the plan was the following: organize for
someone to buy a caravan, place it with explosives and written material of
antisemitic nature, leave it in a specific location, and then, once that
happened, inform law enforcement about an impending terror attack against
Jewish Australians,” Barrett said.
Police suspect that the person “pulling the strings” hired
local criminals to carry out the hoax in the hope of getting “changes to their
criminal status,” she said.
Barrett declined to elaborate on the motivation but said
criminals sometimes seek to leverage information to get a reduced jail sentence
or other benefits.
Jewish group expressed alarm at the revelation.
“The possible role of organized crime in orchestrating major
antisemitic attacks adds a chilling new element to the antisemitism crisis,”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said in a
statement. “Synagogues have been burned, childcare centers have been burned,
and whether it’s been done for financial gain or as part of an antisemitic
ideology or movement, in either case, it’s equally terrifying.”
Ryvchin said the revelations hadn’t brought any great relief
to the Jewish community.
“Now we have organized crime seeking to intimidate and
terrorise the Jewish community for some unknown and bewildering reasons. It
seems to raise more questions than it answers. It certainly won’t lead to a
mass outpouring of relief on the part of the Jewish community,” Ryvchin said.
“Part of the motivation for this attack was to install fear
in the Jewish community, which has been on knife’s edge since the seventh of
October, and we need to remain vigilant,” said Jeremy Leibler, president of the
Zionist Federation of Australia, referring to the Hamas terror group’s October
7, 2023, attack on Israel, which started the war in Gaza.
Police have yet to make any arrests in relation to the
planning of the fabricated plot, but have gone public with the information in
order to provide comfort to the Jewish community in Sydney, Dave Hudson, New
South Wales Police deputy commissioner, told the news conference.
“It was about causing chaos within the community, causing
threat, causing angst, diverting police resources away from their day jobs, to
have them focus on matters that would allow them to get up to or engage in
other criminal activity,” Hudson said.
Police are investigating a suspect involved in an organized
crime network, he added.
Separately, detectives probing a string of antisemitic
incidents across Sydney arrested 14 people Monday, Hudson told reporters.
Following the simultaneous raids in eastern Sydney, five of
the suspects had been charged with offenses including spray-painting graffiti
and property damage, state police said.
None of those arrested displayed “any form of antisemitic
ideology,” Hudson said.
Investigations into attacks on two Sydney synagogues, the
fire bombings of cars, and the spraying of “abhorrent graffiti” on cars and
houses indicated it was only “a very, very small group — and potentially one
individual behind all these matters,” he said.
Police suspect the same “individual or individuals” were
behind both the antisemitic attacks and the trailer hoax, Hudson said.
Leibler thanked police for “taking this seriously and for
making these arrests.”
“While on the one hand, the findings provide some relief to
the Jewish community, it does not take away from the fact that we’ve had an
explosion of antisemitism in this country,” he added.
Australia has suffered a spate of antisemitic attacks since
the start of the war, with homes, schools, synagogues and vehicles targeted by
vandalism and arson, drawing the ire of the country’s traditional ally Israel.
The number of anti-Jewish incidents in the country
quadrupled in the year after the October 7 attack, according to data from the
Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
In December 2024, New South Wales launched Strike Force
Pearl, whose team includes counter-terrorism and special tactics officers, to
investigate antisemitic hate crimes in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, following an
arson attack on the Adass Synagogue.
Australia’s federal police also launched Operation Avalite
to investigate the surge in antisemitic crimes.
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