After Sweep, Australia Adds Security at Parliament

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/world/asia/after-sweep-australia-adds-security-at-parliament.html

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HONG KONG — The Australian government intensified security at the national Parliament building on Friday, a day after the police detained 15 people in an operation that the prime minister said had been prompted by signs that militant Islamists were planning “demonstration executions.”

The security sweep involved some 800 police officers simultaneously raiding homes across western Sydney. By Friday, most of the people detained had been released without being charged. Two were charged: one with conspiring to prepare a terrorist attack, who was held in custody; the other on a weapons count, who was freed on bail.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott and senior Australian police officials said that the investigation into suspected supporters of the Islamic State, a group promoting a vision of an unsparing caliphate at war with those it sees as unbelievers and heretics, was far from over and that serious risks remained of some kind of attack.

“There certainly has been chatter amongst the terrorist support networks of an attack on government and government people, and Parliament House has been specifically mentioned,” Mr. Abbott said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

He said that the Australian Federal Police would augment security at Parliament House, which opened in 1988 and sits semi-embedded in a hill in Canberra, the capital. Mr. Abbott and members of his government also said that the sweeping security raids were needed to thwart plans for attacks on unsuspecting citizens, similar to one in London last year, when an off-duty soldier was hacked to death on a street.

“It is a serious situation when all you need to do to carry out a terrorist attack is to have a knife, an iPhone and a victim,” Mr. Abbott said on Friday.

On Thursday, the police also staged similar raids in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, which will host the Group of 20 summit meeting in November.

Australia has a relatively small population of Muslims and migrants from the Middle East. A census in 2011 found that there were fewer than 500,000 Muslims in a total population of 21.5 million people. But security services have become worried by evidence that a few Muslims, especially young, disaffected men, have embraced the Islamic State’s credo of ruthless religious militancy, and some have traveled to Syria to support the group, which is also known as ISIS.

Mr. Abbott told reporters that an Australian in Syria had been “sending very strong orders back to his networks of followers here in Australia — that is why the police acted swiftly and decisively.” Australian news reports have indicated that the prime minister was referring to Mohammed Ali Baryalei, a former Sydney bouncer now in Syria.

Australia is a close ally of the United States, and Mr. Abbott said last week that his conservative government would send 600 troops to the Middle East to help the effort to contain and extinguish the Islamic State. On Thursday night, protesters in a heavily Muslim suburb of Sydney denounced the police raids, and on Friday news reports said that a mosque in far northern Australia had been vandalized.