7 OCT 2026Operation Pendennis
7 OCT 2026 Bali bombings II
At about 7.30pm Bali time on 1 October 2005, three suicide bombers attacked restaurants in Kuta Square and at Jimbaran Bay in quick succession. Australia's Foreign Minister later confirmed 20 dead: four Australians, fifteen Indonesians and one Japanese national. Seventeen Australians were injured. Early reports gave higher death tolls of 24 to 32, which were later revised.
The four Australians killed were 16-year-old Brendan Fitzgerald of Busselton, WA, and Jennifer Williamson, 48, and Colin and Fiona Zwolinski, all from Newcastle, NSW. They were named by The Age/AAP and the ABC. The ABC reported that about 50 people from Newcastle had been holidaying in Bali, and that Williamson and the Zwolinskis were sitting at one table at Jimbaran Bay.
Australian response: the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience records that two RAAF aircraft and four other emergency flights evacuated 17 Australians. An emergency response team arrived on 2 October with staff from DFAT, the AFP, Defence, Centrelink and Emergency Management Australia, and the AFP sent disaster victim identification experts, bomb experts and investigators. The Age reported that DFAT received about 3,500 calls and Qantas put on three relief flights. Howard called the bombers cowards who had shown blind hatred (The Age, paraphrased).
On the 20th anniversary, 1 October 2025, memorial services were held in Newcastle and Bali. Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced that the government would fund a permanent memorial in Australia.
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7 OCT 2026 Douglas Wood – Australian hostage in Iraq
Douglas Wood was an Australian engineer living in the United States. In late April 2005 he was abducted in Iraq by a group calling itself the Shura Council of the Mujahideen of Iraq. His capture became public on 1 May 2005, when the group released a video of him pleading for his life and asking Australian and US troops to leave Iraq. The kidnappers demanded that Australia withdraw its 1,400 troops. The government refused and instead sent a team of diplomats, police and military personnel to Baghdad to work for his release.
On 15 June 2005 Prime Minister John Howard told Parliament: "I am delighted to inform the House that the Australian hostage in Iraq, Mr Douglas Wood, is safe." Howard said the rescue was "conducted by Iraqi forces in cooperation in a general way with force elements of the United States". He also said no ransom was paid.
Nick Warner, who led the Australian emergency response team, told the ABC's 7.30 Report that an Iraqi military unit, in a sweep-and-cordon operation in the Gazalia area of Baghdad, found Wood and an Iraqi hostage and detained two guards. Warner said Wood had been held for 47 days, blindfolded and handcuffed for most of that time and fed little more than bread and water.
A spokesman for the Wood family, Neil Smail, said the family thanked the Australian Government, agencies in Iraq, and Sydney-based cleric Sheikh Taj El-Din Al-Hilaly for their efforts.
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7 OCT 2026 Anti-Terrorism Act (No. 2) 2005 – control orders
The Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005 was a Howard government bill from the Attorney-General's portfolio. It was introduced in the House of Representatives on 3 November 2005 and passed the House on 29 November. It passed the Senate on 6 December with 74 government amendments. The House agreed to the Senate amendments on 7 December, and the bill received Royal Assent on 14 December 2005 as Act No. 144 of 2005. The Parliament's bill summary lists its main measures:
- control orders and preventative detention orders in the Criminal Code (Schedule 4 of the Act)
- an expanded definition of terrorist organisation
- new terrorism financing offences
- wider stop, question and search powers
- updated sedition offences
- video surveillance at major airports
- stronger ASIO powers
The Age reported that the Senate passed the bill 53 to 7 after the government cut short debate. Labor voted in favour and the Greens and Democrats voted against. Greens leader Bob Brown told the Senate: "We are in a new period of McCarthyism and we need to know that". The Age reported that control orders could last up to 12 months.
The first control order was imposed on Melbourne man Jack Thomas in August 2006, days after the Victorian Court of Appeal had quashed his convictions. The Federal Magistrates Court in Canberra granted an interim order requiring him to stay home between midnight and 5am, report to police three days a week and not leave Australia without permission. Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said the order was about "protecting the Australian community, not punishing the person for an offence".
The control order regime is still in force. The Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, introduced on 12 August 2026, would extend the control order and preventative detention frameworks to 7 December 2029. A parliamentary joint committee is reviewing it.
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7 OCT 2026 Danish Muhammad cartoons published
On 30 September 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. In the paper's own account, it had asked Danish illustrators to draw the prophet "as a contribution to the debate about self-censorship". This followed a Danish author's difficulty finding an illustrator for a children's book about the prophet. The BBC reports that one drawing shows Muhammad with a lit bomb in his turban.
Jyllands-Posten says threats were made against the illustrators straight after publication, and the people who made them were arrested. On 19 October 2005, eleven ambassadors from Muslim countries asked to meet the Danish Prime Minister, who declined on the grounds that the Danish media is governed only by the courts. The BBC dates the ambassadors' complaint 20 October. In November and December a delegation of Danish imams toured the Middle East, taking with them, according to the paper, other offensive drawings that had never appeared in Jyllands-Posten.
The paper published an apology for offence on 30 January 2006, but has not apologised for publishing the drawings. It said: "they have indisputably offended many Muslims for which we apologise". The violent protests followed in early 2006 (see the next entry).
Australian reaction began in February 2006 and is covered in the next entry.
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Introduction
Operation Pendennis was a joint counter-terrorism investigation by ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, Victoria Police and New South Wales Police. It began in 2004 and resulted in a series of arrests between November 2005 and March 2006.
The investigation targeted two connected groups: a Melbourne cell led by Algerian-born cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, and a Sydney cell. Court records state the men were inspired by al-Qaeda and motivated primarily by Australia's participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Sydney cell was the more advanced of the two. It had amassed firearms, ammunition, detonators, chemicals, laboratory equipment and bomb-making instruction manuals. The Melbourne cell's activities were largely supportive, including fund-raising (some of it through fraud and theft), acquiring extremist material and attempting to acquire firearms.
Eighteen men were convicted in total, making Pendennis the largest terrorism prosecution in Australian history.
Government Response
On 2 November 2005, while the operation was still running, the Prime Minister, John Howard, recalled Parliament to urgently amend Australia's terrorism laws. He told Parliament that "the immediate passage of this bill would strengthen the capacity of law enforcement agencies" to respond to the threat. Legal scholarship has since recorded that there was cynicism at the time about the use of a live operation to justify the urgency, and that the Howard government was willing to compress normal parliamentary process on its anti-terror package.
The arrests followed days later. The men were prosecuted under Australia's post-2001 counter-terrorism legislation, in most cases the first time those offences had been tested in court.
Eleven of the accused were held together in the Acacia unit of Barwon Prison in Victoria, isolated from other prisoners, for at least three years while awaiting and attending trial. The Victorian Supreme Court found the conditions posed "a risk to the psychiatric health of even the most psychologically robust individual", citing close confinement, shackling and strip-searching. The defendants were transferred out to the Metropolitan Remand Centre.
The trials and sentencing ran from 2008 to 2010, spanning a change of federal government: the arrests and the legislation came under the Howard Coalition government, the convictions and sentences under the Rudd Labor government. Prisons and state police in both Victoria and New South Wales were under Labor state governments throughout.
Summary
In Melbourne, nine men were convicted: two pleaded guilty and seven were found guilty at trial. Benbrika, aged 45 at arrest and the eldest of the cell, was convicted of directing a terrorist organisation. The average age of the nine was 26.
In Sydney, nine men were convicted. Five of them, Khaled Cheikho, Moustafa Cheikho, Mohamed Ali Elomar, Abdul Rakib Hasan and Mohammed Omar Jamal, were found guilty on 16 October 2009 of conspiring to do acts in preparation for a terrorist act, and were sentenced on 15 February 2010 to terms of up to 28 years. Sentencing them, Justice Whealy found Mohamed Ali Elomar was "the most senior of the offenders" and "a co-ordinator of many aspects of the criminal enterprise", while noting that "each man played a central role". Elomar received the longest sentence: 28 years, with a non-parole period of 21 years (R v Elomar & Ors [2010] NSWSC 10).
Four others, Khaled Sharrouf, Mazen Touma, Mirsad Mulahalilovic and a man identified only as "B", pleaded guilty to lesser offences of possessing things connected with terrorist acts. Two of them had already been released on parole before the trial of the other five had concluded.
Sentencing the Sydney five, the judge stated that without the intervention of the authorities "the plan might well have come to fruition in early 2006 or thereabouts".
Khaled Sharrouf left Australia after his release and travelled to Syria, where he became one of Australia's most wanted men. Mohamed Elomar, who also went to Syria, is the nephew of Mohamed Ali Elomar, his co-accused in the Pendennis trial.
Four years passed between the raids and the first verdicts, and more than four before the Sydney sentences were handed down. What the government did, what it knew, and what became of these men afterwards is set out in the evidence below.
You be the judge.
