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SYDNEY (Reuters) – A man who killed a person during a terrorist attack in the Australian city of Melbourne was known to the police and was the brother of a man arrested under terrorist charges. last year, announced the Australian police on Saturday.
Police officers prevent members of the public from heading to Bourke Street Mall in central Melbourne, Australia on November 9, 2018. REUTERS / Sonali Paul
The 31-year-old Somali-born man burned a truck loaded with gas bottles on Friday in central Melbourne. He stabbed three people and killed one, before being shot by the police.
Local media had named the man on Saturday, but the police did not confirm his identity. Victoria Police Commissioner Graham Ashton said in a television interview that the man's brother was arrested last year for planning an attack in Melbourne and was in jail waiting for his trial. .
"It's certainly a person we know, as well as the federal authorities, in the fight against terrorism and terrorism-related issues," he told the Sunrise show on Channel 7.
"He is the brother of a delinquent or a suspect that we arrested at the end of last year in connection with the preparation of a terrorist event."
The truck carrying BBQ gas bottles burned on busy Bourke Street just before the evening rush hour, the driver having stabbed passersby and attacked the police. (For the map, click here: tmsnrt.rs/2Qu5stX tmsnrt.rs/2Qu5stX))
The bottles did not explode and the fire was extinguished in 10 minutes. The attack was over, but not until the man was fatally wounded.
Bourke Street was reopened to the public on Saturday morning.
In two television appearances on Saturday, Ashton was not questioned about ISIL's claim to responsibility for the bombing, which was published by the Amaq news agency on Friday, and police had earlier refused to to comment on it.
The video posted on Twitter and shown on television showed the man brandishing a knife in front of two police officers, before it collapsed when a man shot him. in the chest. He died later in the hospital.
"People were more upset than anything else because Australians are not used to that sort of thing," Daniel Rachbuch told Sky News on Saturday.
A loyal ally of the United States, Australia is on the alert after a siege at a Sydney café in 2014, and its intelligence agencies have tightened control, although Ashton said she did not been warned of the latest attack.
Report by Tom Westbrook in SYDNEY; Edited by Richard Balmforth; edited by Diane Craft
