A supposed plot to use explosives stashed in a caravan in a “terrorism event” targeting Jewish residents in Australia has been revealed to be a hoax, police said on Monday.
The caravan was discovered in January in a semi-rural suburb on the outskirts of Sydney with “Powergel” mining explosives inside and written notes listing “Jewish entities”, police said.
It hit the headlines after a wave of anti-Semitic firebombings, graffiti and vandalism swept through Melbourne and Sydney in previous months, piling pressure on the Australian government.
Detectives said at the time they were looking into whether the caravan might be part of a preparation for a “terrorism event”, warning that the explosives could have created a 40-metre (130-foot) blast zone.
However, investigators suspected from the start it was “essentially a criminal con job” because of how easily the caravan was found and the lack of any detonator, Australian Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Krissy Barrett told a news conference.
“Today, I can reveal that the caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event, but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit,” she said.
Out of an “abundance of caution”, police followed up terrorism-related tip-offs over the purported caravan plot rather than making public their belief that the information was fake, Barrett said.
‘About causing chaos’
Organised criminals in Australia and offshore contrived the scheme, she said.
“Put simply, the plan was the following: organise for someone to buy a caravan, place it with explosives and written material of anti-Semitic nature, leave it in a specific location, and then, once that happened, inform law enforcement about an impending terror attack against Jewish Australians,” Barrett said.
Police suspect that the person “pulling the strings” hired local criminals to carry out the caravan hoax in the hope of getting “changes to their criminal status”, she said.
Barrett declined to elaborate on the motivation but said criminals sometimes seek to leverage information to get a reduced jail sentence or other benefits.
No one had yet been arrested over the caravan hoax, police said.
But detectives probing a string of anti-Semitic incidents across Sydney arrested 14 people Monday, New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner David Hudson told reporters.
Following the simultaneous raids in eastern Sydney, five of the suspects had been charged with offences including spray-painting graffiti and property damage, state police said.
None of those arrested displayed “any form of anti-Semitic ideology”, Hudson said.
Investigations into attacks on two Sydney synagogues, the fire bombings of cars, and the spraying of “abhorrent graffitti” on cars and houses indicated it was only “a very, very small group — and potentially one individual behind all these matters”, he said.
Police suspect the same “individual or individuals” were behind both the anti-Semitic attacks and the caravan hoax, Hudson said.
“It was about causing chaos within the community, causing threat, causing angst, diverting police resources away from their day jobs to have them focus on matters that would allow them to get up to, engage in other criminal activity,” he added.
“There are a variety of reasons why individuals do this.”
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