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 Three people were killed, including hostage-taker Man Haron Monis,
when police stormed a Sydney cafe early on Tuesday morning to free
terrified hostages held at gunpoint for 16 hours. Police are
investigating whether the two captives were killed by Monis or died
in crossfire.
Monis, a self-styled sheikh who received political asylum from Iran
in 2001, was well known to Australian authorities, having been
charged as an accessory to murder and with dozens of counts of
sexual and indecent assault. He had been free on bail.
Australia passed sweeping security laws in October aimed at stopping
people from becoming radicalized and going to fight in conflicts
such as those in Iraq and Syria, where scores of Australians have
joined militant groups, as well as preventing attacks at home.
Despite those new powers, Abbott said Monis was not on any security
watchlist and managed to walk undetected into the Lindt Chocolate
Cafe with a legally obtained shotgun on a busy workday morning. New
South Wales (NSW) state police later contradicted Abbott's
assertion, telling Reuters in a statement that there was no record
of Monis having a gun license.
 Monis was convicted in 2012 of sending hate mail to the families of
Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
Abbott said the national and state governments would conduct an
urgent review to identify where the system had failed in order to
understand how attacks could be stopped in future.
"We do need to know why the perpetrator of this horrible outrage got
permanent residency. We do need to know how he could've been on
welfare for so many years. We do need to know what this individual
was doing with a gun license," Abbott told reporters in Canberra.
"We particularly need to know how someone with such a long record of
violence, such a long record of mental instability, was out on bail
after his involvement in a particularly horrific crime. And we do
need to know why he seems to have fallen off our security agencies'
watchlist, back in about 2009."
BAIL QUESTIONED
The justice system in New South Wales, Australia's most populous
state, was also under fire.
"We were concerned this man got bail from the very beginning," said
state Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione.
Police had requested courts refuse Monis bail but were not paying
special attention to him because his charges were not linked to
political violence and he was not on any watchlist, he said. Abbott
also raised concern about the bail system.
Greg Barns, a lawyer and a spokesman for the Australian Lawyers
Alliance, told Reuters lengthy delays between arrests and cases
being heard, along with the presumption of innocence, meant more
people were on bail for longer.
"There aren't enough courts, there aren't enough judges, there is
not enough legal aid. Every sector within the criminal justice
system is under-funded by the government," he said.
 Funding for the state's criminal justice system fell 11 percent in
2012/13, according to a government report, while delays in hearing
criminal matters in the state Supreme Court grew to 6.5 months in
2013 from 1.5 months in 2010, according to its annual report.
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New, tougher bail laws have already been passed in the state but
delays caused by the need to train police, courts and lawyers mean
they do not come into force until late January.
MOSQUE THREAT, EXTRA POLICE
Police said on Wednesday a man had been charged with making
threatening phone calls to a mosque in western Sydney, one of the
few confirmed reports of what was feared could be a wave of
anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the violence.
In 2005, racially charged tension between residents from the largely
white beachside neighborhood of Cronulla and Muslim youths from
western Sydney degenerated into days of riots involving thousands of
people.
"There has been some issues of hate or bias crime but it's certainly
minimal compared to the outpouring of support," Assistant Police
Commissioner Michael Fuller told reporters.
On Wednesday, people were still laying flowers and signing
condolence books in Martin Place, a pedestrian mall near the scene
of the cafe siege.
Police also said they would be boosting their presence in prominent
locations such as Sydney Harbour, home to the Opera House, for the
next three weeks as an added precaution.
Iran's Foreign Ministry said it had warned Australia repeatedly
about Monis, who fled Iran claiming persecution.
Recently introduced Australian legislation expanded the intelligence
services' ability to access private computer networks, cracked down
on the leaking of classified information and bolstered the
cooperation of the domestic and foreign intelligence services.
The government is also introducing controversial data retention
laws, although Abbott said on Tuesday it was unclear whether those
laws, aimed at intercepting communications between individuals
plotting attacks, would have helped to stop Monis.
Critics of the security laws, touted by Abbott's conservative
government as necessary to prevent attacks such as the hostage
crisis, have seized on the failure to argue against the granting of
further powers.
"There's no control order regime to account for this. There's no
metadata inside an apparently deranged mind," Fairfax News columnist
Waleed Aly wrote.
(Additional reporting by Swati Pandey, Lincoln Feast, Jane Wardell
and Byron Kaye in SYDNEY and William Maclean in DUBAI; Editing by
Dean Yates, Paul Tait, Robert Birsel)
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