SYDNEY: Australian police said on Tuesday that a brutal knife attack during a live-streamed church service in Sydney was a religiously motivated “terrorist” act, as they urged calm from the angered local community.
Two people were stabbed when a sixteen-year-old suspect rushed the dais at an Assyrian Christian church in western Sydney late Monday, slashing wildly at the bishop who was giving a sermon. The bishop was stabbed in the head and chest and shifted to hospital, AFP reported.
The attacker was immediately subdued by outraged congregants and later taken into police custody. He was “known to police” but was not on any terror watchlists, according to senior officers.
New South Wales police commissioner Karen Webb told a news conference that after consideration of all the material, he declared that it was a terrorist incident. Webb said the attack was considered an act of religiously motivated “extremism” that terrified people– adding that the victims were “lucky to be alive”.
The chief of Australia’s leading spy agency said that the suspect appeared to have acted alone and there was no immediate need to raise the nation’s terror threat level.
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation chief Mike Burgess said in a rare public statement that at this stage, it looks like the actions of an individual.
Riots After Sydney Church Attack
Three other people were treated for non-stab injuries sustained as a result of the attack and about thirty more were treated after a riot that ensued outside the church. For three hours, over five hundred protestors clashed with a phalanx of riot police who battled to prevent them from reentering the church and lynching the teen.
The attacker is now being held at an undisclosed location and is believed to have also sustained knife wounds. Authorities had originally given his age as fifteen. Twenty police vehicles and some houses were damaged as the demonstrators threw bricks, bottles, and other items.
Police said that one officer was hit with a metal object and sustained a twisted knee and a chipped tooth. Another constable sustained a broken jaw after he was hit with a brick and a fence paling, the police added.
Calm was eventually restored, but more officers were deputed to the neighborhood to protect local religious buildings. The church said in a statement on Tuesday that the victim, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, was in a stable condition and “improving”.
