Five held after terror slaying

Australian police have arrested five men in connection with the fatal shooting of a police department accountant, the New South Wales Police Force said Wednesday morning.

Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar, 15, was shot and killed by police after he opened fire on police accountant Curtis Cheng as Cheng left police headquarters in the Sydney suburb of Parramatta last Friday.

More than 200 officers were involved in pre-dawn raids in western Sydney on Wednesday in relation to Mr Cheng’s shooting.

“AFP members have been under a heightened level of security for a few time now and, tragically, the Sydney shooting is a stark reminder for police and the community that the threats are real and the need to remain vigilant is important”.

But Kadomi denied the mosque has anything to do with the teenager’s spiral into extremism that ended with the death of NSW Police finance worker Curtis Cheng.

The arrested were Raban Alou, 18, whose brother was also arrested in raids past year; a 16-year-old boy who is a schoolmate of Farhad in Arthur Philip High; and Mustafa Dirani, 22, a former student of Arthur Philip High.

One of the addresses raided included the Guildford home of Omarjan Azari, arrested as part of Operation Appleby and later charged with conspiring to commit murder and doing an act in preparation for a terrorist attack.

New South Wales state police commissioner Andrew Scipione said it was clear Jabar had “terrorist links”, but there was not enough evidence to hold three of the four men detained.

“What we are investigating is a terrorism offense”, she said, adding that investigators suspect the boy had been influenced, either ideologically or politically, to kill.

“My message today is that we are ignoring our kids, our youth, and they got into mischief because we are not looking after them properly”, he said.

A hundred metres down the road, behind a barricade of more than 100 police, pro-Islamists chanted, their voices drowned out the few who had come to protest the existence of the Parramatta mosque. But they said the teen’s specific motivations were unclear.

‘It is the job of the police, they have to protect us and take care of its people’.

Jabar have not been within spying and started overlooked likely though a several of the uses of Wednesday’s raidboss were usually concentration of anti-terrorism raids only a year ago, Burn said.

Asked if the teenager should have been on the radar of Australia’s counter-terrorism authorities, Burn said “time will clearly tell”.