Horror over a deadly siege morphed into anger on Tuesday as leaders of a grieving nation demanded to know how a man with a violent criminal history was able to slip through the cracks and ended up in the downtown Sydney cafe where he took 17 people hostage. AP reports:
The 16-hour siege ended in a barrage of gunfire and screams early Tuesday morning when police stormed into the Lindt Chocolat Cafe in a desperate bid to free the hostages. Two of the hostages were killed, as was the gunman, Man Haron Monis, a 50-year-old Iranian-born, self-styled cleric described by Australia’s prime minister as a deeply disturbed person carrying out a “sick fantasy.”
“How can someone who has had such a long and checkered history not be on the appropriate watch list? And how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?” Prime Minister Tony Abbott asked at a news conference. “These are questions we need to look at carefully and calmly and methodically. That’s what we’ll be doing in the days and weeks ahead.”
Monis was convicted and sentenced last year to 300 hours of community service for sending what a judge called “grossly offensive” letters to families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009. He later was charged with being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife. Earlier this year, he was charged with the 2002 sexual assault of a woman. He had been out on bail on all the charges.
That history prompted a flurry of questions that remained unanswered more than a day after the siege began Monday morning. Why was Monis out on bail? Why was he not on a terror watch list? How did he get a shotgun in a country with tough gun ownership laws?
Troubled past? Yes, Mecca syndrome may be.