7 OCT 2026Holsworthy Barracks Plot (Operation Neath)
7 OCT 2026 Jakarta hotel bombings
On the morning of 17 July 2009, suicide bombers attacked the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in central Jakarta. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said a bomb went off at the Marriott's Mutiara Restaurant at about 7:45am Jakarta time and another at the Ritz-Carlton's restaurant at about 7:49am. Indonesian police put the death toll at nine, with 55 injured, though early reports conflicted on whether the bombers were included in that figure. Police said the bombers had stayed in Room 1808 of the Marriott for two nights before the attack. They named Jemaah Islamiah as responsible, saying "there are similarities in the bombs used", and officials pointed to Malaysian-born Noordin Mohammed Top. On 17 September 2009, after comparing fingerprints from a body with his, Indonesian police announced that Noordin Top had been killed.
Three Australians were killed: Austrade official Craig Senger, Perth businessman Nathan Verity and Brisbane-based Thiess executive Garth McEvoy. On 19 July Mr Rudd confirmed Mr McEvoy's death and said Mr Senger and Mr Verity were presumed dead. He said DFAT had advised that "apart from military officers and police officers, this is the first Australian Government official to be killed by a terrorist attack in the line of duty."
On the day of the attack, Mr Rudd convened the National Security Committee of Cabinet and said "any terrorist attack anywhere is an attack on us all." He announced a DFAT consular crisis centre and hotline, and offered Indonesia AFP help with forensics, victim identification and counter-terrorism. DFAT updated its travel advisory, and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the AFP was giving specialist help, including enhancing CCTV images.
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7 OCT 2026 Fort Hood shooting
On 5 November 2009, US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan opened fire in a medical building at Fort Hood, Texas, where soldiers were getting checkups before deploying. AP reported that he shouted "Allahu akbar" before shooting, that thirteen people were killed and that "All but one of the dead were soldiers." The shooting ended when Hasan was shot by a civilian police officer, leaving him paralysed from the waist down.
In August 2013 a court-martial panel found Hasan guilty of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder, and on 28 August 2013 it sentenced him to death. The BBC reported that Hasan, a Virginia-born Muslim, said he opened fire to protect Taliban insurgents from troops about to deploy to Afghanistan. Under military law the case is automatically appealed, and the BBC noted that the president must eventually authorise any execution.
In February 2011 the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a report on what it called the "November 5, 2009, terrorist attack". The report said the Defense Department and FBI "collectively had sufficient information necessary to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it."
The shooting was reported in Australia by the ABC and SMH.
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Introduction
In August 2009, Australian security agencies disrupted a plot to carry out an armed assault on Holsworthy Army Barracks in Sydney. The investigation was codenamed Operation Neath.
The plan, as accepted by the court, was for a group of men to enter the army base armed and shoot as many people as possible until they were killed or stopped.
Five men were charged. Three, Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, Saney Edow Aweys and Nayef El Sayed, were convicted in December 2010 of conspiring to do acts in preparation for a terrorist act. Two co-accused, Yacqub Khayre and Abdirahman Mohamud Ahmed, were found not guilty.
Each of the three convicted men was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment, with a non-parole period of 13 and a half years. Justice King called the plot "amateurish". Their appeals against sentence were dismissed in October 2013 (R v Fattal and Ors [2011] VSC 681, Betty King J, Victorian Supreme Court).
Government Response
Operation Neath began in February 2009 as an investigation into domestic support for al-Shabab, the Somali jihadist movement. It followed an earlier investigation, Operation Rochester, launched by the AFP in 2007, which ended without charges. The August 2009 arrests involved raids on 19 properties.
Court evidence established that several of the men had earlier tried to travel overseas to fight, and that their passports had been confiscated by the agencies monitoring them.
The evidence included an intercepted telephone conversation of 10 July 2009 in which Aweys described a plan to enter a barracks and continue until the attackers were stopped, and sought a religious ruling on whether it was permitted.
Summary
In August 2009, police and ASIO disrupted a plan to attack Holsworthy Army Barracks with guns. Three men were convicted and each sentenced to 18 years. Two were acquitted.
Yacqub Khayre, acquitted in 2010, was later the perpetrator of the Brighton siege in Melbourne in June 2017, in which one person was killed and Khayre was shot dead by police.
What was known, what was prevented and what followed is set out in the evidence below.
You be the judge.
