The 24-year-old is expected to be charged with making a document likely to facilitate a terrorist attack, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
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It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in some parts of the country, but in others it feels more like a typical spring day. Green Christmas wins out this year with record-breaking temperatures making for a holiday that could get Heat Miser singing.
The arrests of the men, aged 24 and 20, brings to 13 the number of people arrested in the operation, New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner Catherine Burn said.
Mohammad Rashad Almouie, 20, was on Wednesday morning charged with conspiracy to do an act in preparation to commit a terrorist act, after police allegedly found documents that listed Sydney’s Woolloomooloo naval base as a potential target during a search of his Bankstown home and the Merrylands house of his co-accused, Abdullah Salihy.
One of the men linked to a possible terror plot to be carried out on federal or military buildings was recorded in conversation with another man saying, “Allah is testing people”, police will allege.
A police source told the ABC that the Merrylands home of Salihy raided this morning was also raided earlier this month.
Police said the duo, along with five others arrested earlier, had made hand-written notes on pads that mentioned proposed attacks on several targets including Australia Federal Police (AFP) headquarters, NSW Police buildings and the Garden Island naval base in Woolloomooloo and “guerilla warfare” in the Blue Mountains.
Ms Burn said there was no “specific, current or pending threat”, but rather the arrests related to “a group of people coming together with the idea of preparing to carry out a terrorist attack”.
‘I do need to stress that this activity today relates to events of past year, ‘ she said.
Deputy Commissioner Burn said the operation had a been complex, long-standing investigation into alleged terrorism plots to conduct an attack in NSW.
Australia, a staunch ally of the United States and its battle against Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria, has been on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown radicals since past year.
“The man was detained by ABF [Australian Border Force] counter-terrorism unit team officers as a result of an assessment of advance passenger processing information, which revealed an anomaly with his electronic travel authority”, the ABF said in a statement.
Police say their investigation disrupted the terror plot.
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Further raids this year came after NSW police accountant Curtis Cheng was shot dead outside Police Headquarters in Parramatta in October.
