The man behind the Sydney siege

On Tuesday Australians woke up to find their worst fears realised. The siege in Sydney’s Lindt Chocolate Cafe, which had begun at 9.44am the previous morning (10.44pm on Sunday in Ireland), had come to a sudden and violent end just after 2am.

What the rest of the world knew before most Australians did was that after a 16-hour standoff, two hostages, Tori Johnson (34) and Katrina Dawson (38), were dead, as was the gunman Man Haron Monis (50).

Three others of the 17 hostages were injured, while a police officer involved in the raid that ended the siege suffered a gunshot wound to his face.

Monis was a self-declared Iranian Muslim cleric who was on bail for a string of violent offences, including being an accessory to the murder of his former wife and dozens of sexual assaults.

He had previously come to public attention in 2007 when he was convicted of harassment over writing hate-filled letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

One of the letters was to the family of Greg Sher, a commando killed in Afghanistan. Private Sher was Jewish. “A Jewish man who kills innocent Muslim civilians is not a pig. He is a thousand times worse,” wrote Monis.

The first lawyer he engaged to represent him over these charges, Adam Houda, eventually decided he could not work with Monis. “I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to sack a client, but we walked into the court on the first day where his matter was first mentioned in court and I gave him specific advice not to make any public comment to the media,” Houda told ABC television.

“And when he walked out, he released a chain from under his robe, tied himself to the court and he was stuck there for the next 12 hours, making speeches, holding signs. So, I didn’t want anything to do with that madness.”

Born Mohammad-Hassan Manteghi Borujerdi, Monis sought political asylum in Australia in 1996, which was granted five years later. He told people he had worked for the security service in Iran, but the Iranian authorities say he was a travel agent who had been indicted for fraud and had a "mental condition". Australia refused to extradite him back to the Islamic Republic.

The first Muslims arrived in Australia in 1860 to work with camels that were being used as beasts of burden in the outback, and today there are about 500,000 Muslims in the country, comprising 2.2 per cent of the total population.

Their relationship with Australian society however has at times been uneasy since 2001. In late August 2001, the Australian government made international headlines when it refused to allow a Norwegian ship carrying 438 predominantly Muslim rescued refugees to enter its waters.

In large part due to the ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand, United States) Security Treaty, Australian forces have been involved in the post-9/11 military engagements in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The nightclub bombings on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali in October 2002 were primarily a response to Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan. Of the 202 people killed, 88 were Australian.

Three years later there were further bombings on Bali in which four of the 20 people killed were Australian.

In December 2011, three men were each sentenced to 18 years in prison over a planned terror attack on Holsworthy army barracks in Sydney. In sentencing them, Justice Betty King said none of them showed any remorse and they had not renounced extremism. King described one, Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, as "an intolerant Muslim . . . he believes everything has to be done his way".

Last September the government raised its terror threat level to high from medium and carried out the largest counter-terrorism operation yet seen in Australia, with more than 800 heavily armed officers raiding properties in Sydney and Brisbane.

Feeling aggrieved and persecuted by this and much else in his life, Monis, described by fellow Muslims as being “on the fringe of the fringe”, entered the Lindt cafe in Martin Place on Monday morning.

With non-stop coverage on all the main television and radio channels, a volatile and fluid situation was exacerbated with online rumours of bombs being reported even while terrorism experts tried to make sense of the situation.

Jane Connolly, who has been Ireland’s Consul General in Sydney since August spent much of the day trying to find out if any Irish people had been taken hostage.

“At the beginning nobody knew exactly what was happening,” she said. “Our role was to maintain contact with the authorities as much as we could to try to get as much information as we could about whether Irish nationals were involved.”

There were no Irish people inside the cafe, but Trevor Weafer (33) from Monkstown in Dublin is one of the many Irish who work close by.

He works in sales on King Street, adjacent to Martin Place and about 250 metres from the Lindt cafe. “I pass through that area every morning when I get off the bus,” he says. “We got an internal email saying to stay away from Martin Place. Then an hour later there was an announcement saying our building was in lockdown and nobody was to leave unless absolutely necessary, that we were to stay in the office until further notice.

Then at three o’clock, management said it was better if everybody just went home, but to leave with somebody, not to leave on our own.”

Weafer says his office was panicked. “There was a sense of foreboding all day because various media outlets were putting out unconfirmed stories about bombs around the city, so we didn’t know how it was going to unfold.

“This sort of thing has never really happened here before, so people didn’t really know how to react. Everywhere was evacuated so quickly; people had a sense that something really bad was going to happen,” he said.

“It’s scary to think that this can happen on your doorstep,” Weafer adds. “No matter where you are in the world you never think this is going to happen where you are; you always just see this stuff on TV. It’s scary to think that could have been me or any of my colleagues or friends in Sydney just going for a coffee.”

Having reassured family and friends in Ireland that he was okay, Weafer says the siege has not changed his views on Australia or Sydney.

“It was nice how Australians came together with the #illridewithyou hash tag on Twitter to support the Muslim community. It was a nice gesture and it showed people were quite unified,” he says.

The #illridewithyou hashtag was a message telling women wearing burkas and other Islamic outfits that they would be protected from attacks on public transport. The message trended worldwide and was widely praised, but not everyone was happy with it.

Government backbench MP George Christensen said it is “a typical pathetic left-wing black-armband brigade campaign, casting Aussies as racists who will endanger Muslims”.

Parts of Martin Place, which is called after Sir James Martin, a former premier and chief justice of New South Wales, who was born in Midleton, Co Cork, in 1820, are still closed off. However the underground train station on the street has reopened and there are thousands upon thousands of flower bouquets near one of its entrances.

The businesses of finance, law, politics and media, which are all centred around Martin Place, are returning to normal.

English musician Damon Albarn’s show at the Opera House was postponed last Monday, but in its place he played two shows on Tuesday. His only reference to why the first show has been rescheduled from the night before was when he said at the start: “Well, we’re here, you’re here, let’s have some fun.” The audience response said it was the right reaction.

Man Haron Monis was not acting under the auspices of any Islamic terrorist organisation. He was a mentally unstable lone wolf who had the world’s attention until the Taliban massacred more than 100 children in Pakistan.

Australia is one of the freest societies in the world, but as the Irish politician John Philpot Curran said in 1790: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.” (This is generally paraphrased as “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”.)

The actions of Monis should not be allowed to rob Australia of any of its liberty.