Mark Morri, crime editor for Ausralia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, reported January 29 a plot uncovered by New South Wales Police over a week ago involving a large amount of explosives placed inside a caravan, or van, to be used to bomb a synagogue, presumably in Sydney where the discovery was made.
According to Sky News Australia, the NSW Police, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian ASIO intelligence agency are investigating and several arrests have been made. Morri told Sky News Australia police believe they have arrested low-level operatives in the plot but not the ring leaders. Police also found a list of addresses of Jewish targets including at least one synagogue in the same van with the explosives, according to Sky News Australia and the Daily Telegraph.
Morri also told Sky News Australia NSW Police were caught by surprise when Labor PM Anthony Albanese claimed publicly last week “foreign actors” were financing local criminal lackeys to carry out anti-Semitic acts in Australia. Skeptics said then Albanese was looking for an off-ramp to evade charges he was at least passively complicit in the massive rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Australia since October 9, 2023, in the run-up to a national election expected sometime between February and May. Morri said AFP and ASIO failed to share intelligence with NSW Police regarding Bitcoin payments to those involved in the van bomb plot. Both NSW and Victoria state police forces have failed to stop anti-Semitic pro-Hamas events and parades and have, instead, detained and arrested Jews for showing themselves in public and several Jews for daring raise an Israeli flag in public. Given the different parties in power in the two main Australian states and the two major cities Sydney and Melbourne, it’s almost a certainty state police have been acting on instruction from the federal level to tolerate Hamas boosters and suppress support for Israel, in line with the Labor Government’s anti-Israel and pro-Hamas policies.
NSW Police deputy commissioner Dave Hudson told a press conference the explosives were a gel-ignite substance stolen from a mining site. A local resident in the rural Sydney suburb of Dural reported the van to police as suspicious. According to police the van had been left along Derriwong Road in Dural since December 7 of 2024, A local resident moved it off the road and noticed what turned out to be explosives in the back. The plot was uncovered on January 19 when police entered the automobile, according to deputy commissioner Hudson. He said the potential blast-range of the explosives in the van comprised a radius of 40 meters, or about 120 feet.
Update: Sky News Australia reported Thursday there were addresses and presumably targets in the van filled with explosives: the Sydney Holocaust Museum and Sydney’s Great Synagogue.
Update 2: PM Albanese has refused to confront the media with what he knew and when knew it, leading to speculation the NSW Police kept him, ASIO and the AFP out of the loop. Reporters have also started talking about the van being loaded with plastic explosives instead of the initial “gel-ignite” bomb. Australian media are also reporting along with the list of two Jewish targets a note reading “Fuck the Jews” was also found in the van, which so far hasn’t led to speculation about a false-flag operation. Australian media also reported several anti-Semitic attacks over the weekend in Sydney and Melbourne, with NSW Police focusing on an egg-throwing attack at Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach where three young men threw eggs at three young women wearing Star of David necklaces. NSW Police tracked down the abandoned vehicle used in that incident and were suspicious of an empty gasoline can inside the vehicle. NSW Police say they are investigating this as an anti-Semitic hate crime.
Update 3: Australian media reported Tuesday the list of targets conveniently found in the caravan of doom also contained addresses of Jewish individuals. PM Albanese during parliamentary question time continued to refuse Monday and Tuesday to answer when he was briefed about the terror plot. Opposition LNP leader Peter Dutton said during question time Albanese hadn’t been briefed because NSW Police feared he would leak the information and disrupt their investigation. ALbanese failed to respond to that accusation.