Heightened airport security after plane attack plot foiled
Print Edition
SECURITY remained tight at airports around Australia with more intense screening of luggage after law enforcement officials thwarted what a police chief described yesterday as a “credible attempt to attack an aircraft.”
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton declined to comment on newspaper reports that Islamist extremists planned to kill the occupants of a plane with poison gas and that a homemade bomb was to be disguised as a kitchen mincer.
“Police will allege they had the intent and were developing the capability,” Turnbull told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
On Sunday, Turnbull said “a terrorist plot to bring down an airplane” had been disrupted, but revealed few details.
Four men arrested in raids in Sydney on Saturday — two Lebanese-Australian fathers and their sons — had yet to be charged.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin said a court ruled yesterday that the four could be detained without charge for seven days under counterterrorism laws.
“We believe we have disrupted a legitimate and credible attempt to attack an aircraft,” Colvin told reporters without elaborating.
Colvin has repeatedly described the threat as a “device,” without mentioning whether it was explosive.
“The plot that we are investigating we believe was an attempt to put a device onto an aircraft, but beyond that the speculation is just that — speculation,” he said, adding that police had “many working theories.”
Colvin and the government will not comment on media reports the suspects were not previously known to Australian security officials and that their arrests followed a tip from a foreign intelligence agency.
“Australians can be assured that we have very fine intelligence services and we moved extremely quickly on this one and, as you can see, with the right outcomes,” Turnbull said.
The Australian newspaper cited multiple anonymous sources saying the plotters were constructing a “non-traditional” explosive device that could have emitted a toxic, sulfur-based gas to kill or immobilize everyone on an aircraft.
Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph said the plotters planned to make a bomb from wood shavings and explosive material inside a piece of kitchen equipment such as a mincing machine.
When police raided five homes on Saturday they removed a domestic grinder and a mincer used to make sausages, the newspaper reported.
The plot involved smuggling the device onto a flight from Sydney to the Middle East, possibly Dubai, as carry-on luggage, the newspaper said.
Fairfax Media reported that the bomb was found in a home in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills, a few doors from the local mosque.
Turnbull declined to say whether the group was guided by someone overseas.
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