Australian officials said Saturday that a shooting in Sydney in which a civilian police employee was killed the previous day was terrorist related, identifying the gunman as a 15-year-old boy.
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The shooting took place around 4:30 p.m. local time outside the New South Wales Police headquarters on Charles Street in Parramatta, a western suburb of Sydney.
The boy, of Iraqi-Kurdish background and born in Iran, then continued to fire until he was shot dead by officers.
New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said the victim was shot at close range with a handgun as he left work.
“If it’s politically motivated violence, then under our definition, it is deemed necessarily an act of terrorism”, he said.
Quoting the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Reuters said a man had fired on the building, hitting a police employee before being shot dead by police.
‘I can’t go into the details.
Mr Scipione said he had been advised the teenager had attended a mosque before the shooting, but reminded people these attacks were the acts of a small minority.
Cheng had worked with the New South Wales police force for 17 years.
The chairman of Parramatta Mosque, Neil El-Kadomi, said he was contacted by police on Friday night and shown a photograph of the gunman who entered the mosque before the attack.
“We need to be mindful of that but we also need to accept that the vast majority of them are very much supportive of the broader Australian community”.
“Our message is we’ll keep Police Association members safe and the police commissioner is helping us do that”, Mr Gooley said.
The Muslim community should not be blamed or vilified for the actions of a 15-year-old boy who executed a NSW Police employee in “cold blood” in Sydney’s west, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Saturday. “A critical incident team will now investigate all circumstances surrounding the incident”.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Muslim families were the “front line of defence” against radicalised young people and the Government was working at the grassroots level to combat the problem. The group of children were locked inside the centre after one of the bodies lay at the door.
“We are not sure whether he was targeted because he came from a police facility”, Scipione said.
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Numan Haider, an 18-year-old who was killed by police in Melbourne on September 23, 2014 after he allegedly attacked them with a knife, had displayed erratic behaviour over the previous weeks as a result of the cancellation of his passport. “We shouldn’t be treating entire communities like they are all suspects because that’s simply not the case”.
