It’s official: ASIO got 15 people killed.
New claims from a whistleblower: ASIO were warned about the Bondi shooters, but made a choice not to do anything
Last month, I wrote an article for this esteemed publication about the Bondi shooting, covering the links between the father-son shooters and an ISIS cell in Sydney’s Bankstown, a cell which ASIO (Australia’s equivalent to the NZSIS or MI5) knew was cultivating recruits for attacks; how the government’s initial inquiry into intelligence was set up to fail, and how the inquiry was watered down even further when it made the jump to being a proper royal commission.
At the time of that last article, what ASIO knew about the attackers or could have done wasn’t entirely clear. However, last week’s episode of Four Corners featuring “Marcus”, the same whistleblower from last year’s report on ASIO’s foreknowledge of the Wakeley bishop stabbing, revealed what I and many others suspected: the Bondi shooters were active in Wissam Haddad’s pro-ISIS network.
Wissam Haddad is an extremist pro-ISIS preacher who up until last month, ran the Al Madina Dawah Centre, an Islamic prayer centre described by Marcus as being like an “ISIL camp in Syria or in Iraq”. Haddad also ran a street preaching operation, which Haddad used to recruit young and vulnerable people and radicalise them into supporting ISIS.
Marcus, the Four Corners whistleblower, was hired by ASIO in 2016 to pretend to be a radical imam in order to infiltrate Sydney’s extremist pro-ISIS groups, as well as Wissam Haddad’s “inner circle”. Haddad’s operation was heavily surveilled by ASIO. According to the spy turned whistleblower, ASIO believes Haddad is “the most important jihadist extremist preacher in Sydney.”
According to Marcus, ISIS videos and songs were frequently played at the prayer centre, a crime in Australia, and something corroborated by Haddad’s conviction for possessing ISIS flags and DVDs of ISIS videos in 2015.
Supposedly, Naveed Akram went from a “normal” teenager to growing close with ISIS supporters at a “religious retreat”, where he was shown ISIS videos from various countries, including a video which called for attacks on Australia.
Another person radicalised in Haddad’s network was Isaac El Matari, a 20-year-old who declared himself the leader of ISIS in Australia, who was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to 5 years jail for planning terror attacks. Marcus claims that Naveed Akram’s relationship with El Matari before his arrest was so close that Naveed had foreknowledge of the attacks. ASIO was aware of this relationship back in 2019 when El Matari was arrested.
Also revealed by Marcus was the fact that Sajid Akram, Naveed’s father, openly endorsed ISIS and El Matari’s plot. Marcus reported this to ASIO, who opened an investigation into the father and son in 2019. ASIO spoke with Sajid and he promised that he wouldn’t allow Naveed to associate with extremists anymore, with ASIO subsequently determining that the Akrams were not ISIS supporters and closing the investigation.
However, Sajid was already by then a close associate of a man named Ye Ye, an influential pro-ISIS preacher who did recruiting for Wissam Haddad. As we all know, Sajid and Naveed Akram would later go on to commit the deadliest attack on Australian soil since Port Arthur.
This episode is damning and poses serious questions about both ASIO’s conduct and what they’re doing with their budget, a figure which currently sits at A$1.1 billion and only seems to grow every year.
ASIO are secret police with extraordinary powers: instead of having to get their warrants signed off by a judge, as is usual in Australia, ASIO only has to get approval from the Attorney-General, an appointed government minister, and ASIO’s only requirement to get a warrant issued is that it would help further ASIO’s goals. ASIO can subject people (including children as young as 14) to special questioning warrants which allow ASIO to take away their right to silence and forcibly question them or produce any information. The subject of a questioning warrant doesn’t even have to commit or be implicated in a crime; the questioning warrant just has to help ASIO collect intelligence.
ASIO do not have to give you a copy or details of the warrant or tell you why it was issued. Someone who has been subject to a questioning warrant is not allowed to talk about the questioning they were subject to. In fact, it is illegal to name or identify an ASIO agent or “affiliate” under any circumstances and you could face up to ten years prison for doing so, and there is no public interest defence. It is also illegal to speak of ASIO’s “special intelligence operation[s]” – that is – ASIO operations where the participants in them are immune from any criminal or civil liability for anything they do as part of the operation, so long as they do not torture, kill, or rape anybody.
In short: ASIO can kidnap anybody they believe has knowledge that may help them, take away their right to silence, and it is illegal for the person they kidnapped to talk about it or who kidnapped them.
The only conclusion one could make from this episode is that ASIO had clear knowledge that the attackers were dangerous and a threat to the public, and they failed to stop them. ASIO has no shortage of powers at their disposal that could have been used to stop this.
This is not acceptable for an agency of their nature. Attacks like the one we saw in Bondi need to be caught and stopped before they happen every single time. Every time an attack isn’t prevented, that means that it was carried out and someone was harmed or killed. At this point, it’s safe to say that ASIO got 15 people killed.
However, ASIO has been doing its best to hide from accountability. The night before the Four Corners episode went to air, ASIO published a statement to its website trying to discredit the whistleblower and the Four Corners episode before the public could see the claims for themselves. In the statement, ASIO insists that Four Corners broadcast fabrications, and laughably claims that Marcus misidentified Naveed Akram.
This doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Many of Marcus’ claims about his background were able to be confirmed by Four Corners and line up with publicly available information. Unlike ASIO, nothing Marcus has said has been proven false. If Marcus really was lying or mistaken, ASIO could release the intelligence which proves that – they instead have chosen not to and are hiding behind smug assertions and petty attacks.
ASIO also claimed that the ABC’s previous reporting that the Akrams were given military training in the Philippines is false, sticking to the story that the Akrams’ 27-day trip to the Philippines in November 2025, a month before the attack, was spent almost entirely inside their hotel rooms, only leaving for very short periods of time.
This narrative about their trip does not stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny, given that the Akrams travelled to the Philippines soon after they began training for the attack on a rented rural New South Wales property; their phones were logged on to phone towers near an ISIS hotspot in central Mindanao, and Filipino police have stated that the Akrams visited a gun shop while in the Philippines.
ASIO ended their statement with an ominous threat against the ABC: “if the ABC chooses to publish claims it cannot substantiate – particularly ones it has been told are untrue – we [ASIO] will reserve our right to take further action.”
What you just read is Australia’s secret police sending out ominous and vague threats to journalists and the country’s largest and most important media outlet after they failed to get an episode pulled from airing.
Former ABC journalist and Four Corners producer Peter Cronau described the statement as “unprecedented”, saying that it’s “exceptional for ASIO to publicly threaten the media – let alone threaten to take ‘further action’ rather than ‘further legal action’”; it’s “exceptional for ASIO to itself directly take on the ABC” rather than its parent agency, and “exceptional for ASIO to take such an aggressive tone in its direct communications with the ABC.”
When Senator David Shoebridge asked ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess at a Senate estimates hearing about the threat his agency issued to the ABC, Burgess refused to elaborate on what “further action” against the ABC entailed. Apart from that, no other senator at that estimates hearing decided that it was prudent to ask Burgess about the Four Corners episode.
This threat from ASIO came two days after the National Archives of Australia issued an order forbidding the ABC and SBS, Australia’s two public broadcasters, from destroying any information relating to “the capabilities and powers of law enforcement, border control, [and] immigration and security agencies to respond to antisemitic conduct”, as well as “the circumstances surrounding the Bondi terrorist attack” which includes government agencies’ “knowledge prior to the attack”, “judgments, decisions and actions made in relation to the attack”, and “interactions and information sharing between agencies”.
The scope of this order includes messages with sources, which severely undermines ABC and SBS journalists’ ability to protect their identities. The ABC’s leadership also refused to describe how the ABC would protect its journalists if compelled by the antisemitism royal commission to hand over documents.
Clearly, ASIO is desperate to avoid all accountability for this. As I wrote in my previous article about Bondi, the royal commission has been set up to fail. Its terms of reference have been watered down to avoid any real inquiry into intelligence. The inclusion of former ASIO director and ambassador to America Dennis Richardson will also ensure that to the extent that the royal commission does investigate intelligence, it will certainly avoid any hard questions or topics that overly scrutinise Australia’s intelligence agencies.
It seems less likely than ever that the survivors and families of the victims of this horrendous attack will ever be allowed to know the truth of what happened leading up to the shooting. And it seems more likely than ever that nobody at ASIO or Australia’s law enforcement and intelligence community at large who allowed this to happen will have to lose their job, let alone face actual consequences.
Marcus, the ASIO whistleblower, went to great lengths to try stop attacks like the one we saw at Bondi and Wakeley at a great risk to himself. He has not been rewarded for it. Instead, he has been abandoned by Australia’s government, having lost his residency in Australia and perhaps even facing prosecution for revealing classified information. He now lives in hiding, separated from his family, and is now under threat from the ISIS cell which he blew the whistle on. The Information Rights Project, a charity led by Julian Assange’s brother, is currently running a fundraiser for him as he is currently running out of money while facing great danger to his livelihood. So far they’ve only been able to raise around $42,000 – less than a quarter of the $200,000 goal.
I implore all of you to donate to this fundraiser. I donated $20 myself. It’s important that whistleblowers are provided refuge and support. It rewards people who did the right thing and will ensure that future whistleblowers will feel safe in coming out.
You can donate to Marcus at the link here: https://informationrights.org/take-action/save-marcus-now
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