Melbourne, Australia — Five teenagers accused of following a violent extremist ideology have been charged with a series of offenses in an investigation that began with the stabbing of a bishop at a Sydney church, police said on Thursday.
The five, aged between 14 and 17, were among seven youths arrested in Sydney’s south-west on Wednesday in a major Joint Counter-Terrorism Team operation. The team includes federal and state police, as well as the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, the country’s main domestic spy agency, and the New South Wales Crime Commission, which specializes in extremists and organized crime. .
Two 16-year-olds and a 17-year-old have been charged with conspiring to participate in or plan a terrorist act, according to a police statement. The older boy was also accused of carrying a knife in public, he added.
Two boys, ages 14 and 17, were charged with possession or control of violent extremist material accessed online, police said.
All five remained in police custody and were due to appear in juvenile court on Thursday.
Two other children arrested Wednesday have not been charged so far, police said. Police were questioning three other minors and two men, but they were not detained, police said.
More than 400 police officers on Wednesday executed 13 search warrants at properties in southwest Sydney and one in Goulburn, a town about 200 kilometers (120 miles) south of Sydney.
New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner David Hudson alleged on Wednesday that the arrested children “adhered to a violent and religiously motivated extremist ideology”.
Police allege the network included the 16-year-old accused of stabbing an Assyrian Orthodox bishop and priest during a church service that was streamed online on April 15. That boy was charged Friday with committing a terrorist act, a crime that carries a maximum penalty. of life imprisonment.
The two clerics survived the attack, which was the second recent high-profile stabbing to rock Sydney. Three days earlier, a 40-year-old man with a history of mental illness and for no apparent reason was shot and killed by police inside a shopping center after killing six people and wounding a dozen others.
Police said there was no threat to Thursday’s Anzac Day events, when thousands gather for dawn services and street marches across Australia to commemorate the nation’s war dead.
Extremists have planned mass casualty attacks in recent Anzac Days, but police intervened before the plans were carried out.
April 25 is the date in 1915 on which the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the beaches of Gallipoli, in northwest Turkey, in an unfortunate campaign that marked the first combat of the soldiers of the First War. World.