Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A short time ago, I spoke via Skype to Sydney-based journalist Stuart Cohen, who’s been covering the story and the ongoing politics investigation.
Stuart Cohen, thank you for talking with us.
What evidence, first of all, did police have before they arrested these suspects?
STUART COHEN, Freelance Journalist: Well, obviously, as with any sort of intelligence operation, they’re playing their cards very close to the vest.
But one thing that they did let out was that the raids that took place in Sydney were based on an intercepted phone call between that senior ISIS militant, that senior Australian ISIS militant that Tony Abbott mentioned in the piece before, and Omarjan Azari, who was the 22 year old who is the only person that has actually been charged in these arrests so far.
So that’s the one piece of intelligence that they did let slip, that they had intercepted a phone call, and that was what sort of put this whole operation in motion, realizing that they were close to possibly carrying out these attacks.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And what made them think that these individuals were actually going to carry them out?
STUART COHEN: Well, they have been having these people under surveillance for a while. That’s the best that the police would say. They have been watching these people.
Obviously, they had reason ever since the terror alert was raised last week to high, which means that the terror alert is now — or a terror attack is now likely in Australia, they have been putting some increased scrutiny on people. They know where the radical Islamic element is in Sydney, and they keep a lot of these people under surveillance. And they figured the time was right.
It was time to get in there and start making arrests before the worst thing could happen and they could carry out some sort of an attack.
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