Australia cops say apparent antisemitic terror wave was a “criminal con”

An explosives-filled trailer that Australian politicians earlier described as an antisemitic terrorism plot and a foiled mass casualty event was staged by criminals in a complicated hoax and was never meant to be detonated, police said Monday.

Law enforcement agencies investigating January’s discovery of the trailer on the outskirts of Sydney divulged in a news conference that its placement was concocted by criminals who meant to derive personal gain from tipping off authorities to its presence — a bizarre twist in a saga that followed a monthslong wave of antisemitic crimes in Australia.

The cluster of attacks targeting places where Jewish people live, work and study, including a firebombing of a synagogue and a daycare center and several instances of antisemitic vandalism, were committed by “a very small group, and potentially one individual behind all those matters,” Deputy Police Commissioner for the state of New South Wales David Hudson told reporters on Monday.

Authorities in January made the unusual claim that none of the 12 they had then arrested in relation to the spate of crimes in Australia’s largest cities Sydney and Melbourne was driven by antisemitic ideology and were instead criminals for hire. Hudson said 14 more arrested Monday were not motivated by hate either.

But he added he has no doubt that antisemitism in Australia — which has dominated news media and the political sphere following the recent spate of crimes — has experienced “an escalation over the past 18 months” since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.

Preliminary data released by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry just a few months after that attack showed a total of 662 antisemitic incidents across Australia were reported during October and November 2023. 

“By comparison, there were 495 anti-Jewish incidents reported in Australia for the entire 12 months to 30 September 2023,” the council said at the time.

In response to the rise in such incidents, Australia enacted new laws in January 2024 explicitly banning the performance of the Nazi salute in public and the display or sale of Nazi hate symbols such as the swastika. The new laws also made the act of glorifying or praising acts of terrorism a criminal offense.

“Essentially a criminal con job”

But a number of incidents now appear to have been part of the elaborate criminal hoax, and not, in fact, rooted in antisemitism.

The revelation — leaked to the public before law enforcement planned to announce it — that a trailer was found in January outside Sydney, packed with explosives used in the mining industry and containing a list of purported Jewish targets, prompted state and national leaders to say it represented an escalation in potential extremist violence.

But investigators said Monday that they “almost immediately” believed the trailer’s appearance was “part of a fabricated terrorist plot, essentially a criminal con job,” but kept their suspicions a secret, according to Australian federal police deputy commissioner Krissy Barrett.

The trailer was easily found and the explosives were visibly displayed. “Also, there was no detonator,” Barrett said, adding that it was “never going to cause a mass casualty event.”

Instead, those who staged the caravan planned to then inform the authorities of an impending attack against Jewish Australians, said Barrett. Why investigators believed they had done so was not simple.

The motivation, overseas interests, and a culprit still at large

Barrett and Hudson, speaking on behalf of a joint law enforcement effort assembled to arrest the perpetrators of antisemitic crimes, said they believed those who faked the trailer plot meant to attract attention from authorities, divert police resources, create fear and leverage the situation for personal gain. That might have included attempts to use information about an attack to bargain with police for lesser sentences in other criminal proceedings.

“We believe the person pulling the strings wanted changes to their criminal status but maintained a distance from their scheme and hired alleged local criminals,” Barrett said. That person remains at large, she added.

Authorities have said since January that they believe overseas interests are orchestrating the crimes, although they haven’t been more specific. They also haven’t divulged which local criminal groups might have been hired to undertake the attacks, which have included hateful graffiti.

It wasn’t the only time this has happened, Barrett added. “Too many offenders working in a criminal gig economy are accepting these tasks for money,” she said.

The 14 people arrested Monday face charges in relation to the more than a dozen attacks investigators believe were orchestrated.

The strange twist caps a summer where antisemitic crimes roiled Sydney and Melbourne, home to 85% of Australia’s Jewish population. One person has been physically hurt — a worshipper who suffered burns in the fire that was set at a Melbourne synagogue in December.

There was “some comfort to be taken by the Jewish community,” in the fact that the worst episodes were not ideological acts of hated, Hudson said. But the crimes have had “a chilling effect on the Jewish community” and provoked unwarranted suspicion of other groups, Barrett added.

The high-profile attacks are not the only ones police are investigating. Nearly 200 more people have been charged since October 2023 in the state of New South Wales, where Sydney is located, with crimes linked to antisemitism, police told The Associated Press in February.