Political and religious leaders are pleading for calm amid a “combustible situation” set off by a stabbing at a western Sydney church and subsequent riot, as the state mulls tighter knife laws following two serious stabbing incidents in as many days.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, held a joint press conference with police and security chiefs in Canberra on Tuesday morning, hours after New South Wales declared as a terrorist attack the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at a service at the Assyrian Christ the Good Shepherd church in Wakeley just after 7pm on Monday.
Counter-terrorism investigators – a joint team comprising NSW and federal police as well as the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) – now have extraordinary powers under NSW laws to investigate the attack, as well as conduct searches to prevent any further suspected attacks.
A live stream of the service on the church’s website showed a person approaching the altar who then appeared to stab toward the bishop’s head multiple times.
The congregation then swarmed forward, with a scuffle ensuing between the worshippers and the attacker. Police arrested a 16-year-old and were forced to hold him at the church for his own safety as a large crowd of several hundred people gathered outside the church. Riot police were called in to forcibly move the crowd on after police cars were smashed.
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, gathered leaders of the local Muslim, Assyrian and Melkite communities for an emergency meeting at 10.30pm on Monday, organising for them to put their names to a statement condemning the violence and calling for calm.
However, tensions remained fresh on the ground as Minns, local MPs and the Fairfield mayor visited near the site of the incident.
Meanwhile, leaders of the Lakemba mosque in Sydney’s west revealed they had received threats to firebomb the mosque on Monday night and would have heightened security over the next week.
“It’s a combustible situation and I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” Minns told 2GB on Tuesday afternoon. Communities in western Sydney were on high alert for the potential for “tit for tat” retaliations, he said.
Minns also confirmed the teenager had been found in possession of a flick knife at a train station in November last year and that a magistrate had placed him on a good behaviour bond over the incident earlier this year. Minns also said the boy had been found with a knife at school in 2020.
“Part of the reason the commissioner for police made a terrorism designation investigation at 1.30 this morning was because of the person of interest’s history,” Minns said.
Asked if knife laws should be strengthened in NSW following the incidents at the church and Bondi Junction in recent days, Minns noted rules had already been tightened following the murder of a paramedic in recent months, but said he was open to exploring reforms.
“I’m not prepared to rule anything out right now. Obviously when people are being killed and you’ve got a situation where a knife is being used, then it would be irresponsible not to look at,” Minns said.
Albanese on Tuesday expressed his sympathies to the Assyrian community in western Sydney. “This is a disturbing incident. There is no place for violence in our community.”
“There’s no place for violent extremism. We’re a peace-loving nation. This is a time to unite, not divide, as a community and as a country.”
Albanese declined to state the religion of the attacker, but the Asio chief, Mike Burgess, at the joint press conference with the prime minister said he was aware of video of the alleged offender speaking in Arabic.
“If he [the bishop] didn’t get himself involved in my religion, if he hadn’t spoken about my prophet, I wouldn’t have come here … if he just spoke about his own religion, I wouldn’t have come,” the alleged attacker can be heard saying in the video.
The video reportedly shows the mayhem that followed the attack, with people in bloodied clothes walking around as the alleged attacker is held against the ground.
Emmanuel, who has a popular online presence, has previously criticised Islam and the prophet Muhammad in public sermons.
On the declaration of the event as a terrorist attack, Burgess said: “To call it a terrorist act, you need indications of information or evidence that suggest actually the motivation was religiously motivated or ideologically motivated.
“In the case of Saturday [the stabbing at Bondi Junction], that was not the case. In this case, the information we have and the police have before us indicates that is strongly the case. That is why it was called an act of terrorism.”
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By declaring the event a terrorist attack, police will have greater investigative powers under NSW’s terror laws. It includes powers to search properties and vehicles, among other methods, to examine a past attack or prevent a suspected one from occurring.
Burgess said that despite the declaration of a terrorist attack, the current terror level threat for Australia – “possible” – would not be raised: “One incident like this does not change the threat level but we keep it under review.”
He said that while there were no indications of others connected to the attacker, Asio was investigating to determine there were no further threats.
The Australian federal police commissioner, Reece Kershaw, also at the joint press conference, called the subsequent commotion “a disgraceful act from the community who attacked police at that scene”.
Minns said the decision to make the terror declaration was taken early on Tuesday morning and validated by the police minister.
The NSW police commissioner, Karen Webb, said a strike force had been established to investigate the incident.
“We’ll allege there’s a degree of premeditation on the basis this person has travelled to that location, which is not near his residential address, he has travelled with a knife and subsequently the bishop and the priest have been stabbed,” Webb said.
Webb said that after the stabbing a crowd of people then “converged on that area and began to turn on police”. Police estimate the crowd grew from 50 people to approximately 500.
The alleged attacker severed his own finger during the attack, Minns said, after earlier questions of whether his finger was cut in retaliation.
“People used what was available to them in the area, including bricks, concrete, palings, to assault police and throw missiles at police and police equipment and police vehicles.”
Some police officers were injured and taken to hospital overnight, while 20 police vehicles were damaged and 10 rendered unusable, Webb said.
The NSW ambulance commissioner, Dominic Morgan, said 30 patients had been assessed and treated overnight, with seven taken to hospital, about 20 of them having been affected by capsicum spray.
Paramedics had come “directly under threat” and had to retreat into the church during the riot, with six of them stuck in the church for three and a half hours, Morgan said.
The alleged offender had not previously been on any terror watch list.