Five Teenagers Charged in Sydney Church Stabbing Investigation
Five teenagers have been charged with a range of offenses, including terrorism-related crimes, as part of an investigation into a stabbing at a Sydney church. The five, aged 14 to 17, were among seven boys arrested across southwest Sydney on Wednesday in a major operation by the Joint Counter-Terrorism Team. The team comprises federal and state police, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, and the New South Wales Crime Commission.
Two boys aged 16 and a 17-year-old have been charged with conspiring to engage in or planning a terrorist act. The older boy was also charged with carrying a knife in public. Two boys aged 14 and 17 were charged with possessing or controlling violent extremist material accessed online. All five remained in police custody and were scheduled to appear before a children’s court Thursday. Police allege the network included the 16-year-old boy accused of stabbing an Assyrian Orthodox bishop and priest during a church service that was being streamed online on April 15. That boy was charged Friday with committing a terrorist act, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.
The two clerics survived the attack, which was the second high-profile recent stabbing to rock Sydney. Three days earlier, a 40-year-old man with a history of mental illness and no apparent motive was shot dead by police inside a shopping mall after he killed six people and wounded a dozen others. Police said there was no threat to Thursday’s events for Anzac Day, when thousands gather for dawn services and street marches around Australia to commemorate the nation’s war dead. Extremists have plotted mass-casualty attacks on past Anzac Days, but police have intervened before plans were executed. April 25 is the date in 1915 when the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the beaches of Gallipoli, in northwest Turkey, in an ill-fated campaign that was the soldiers’ first combat of World War I.
