Prosecutors have bemoaned another delay in a mammoth legal case against a cohort of alleged terror teens accused of plotting an attack in Sydney two years ago.
First revealed by The Saturday Telegraph in April 2024, the four teenagers were arrested in sweeping counter-terrorism raids across southwest Sydney after that month’s Wakeley church stabbing terror attack.
The accused teenagers – who were all minors at the time of the alleged offending and cannot be named – were allegedly associates of the boy accused of that terror attack at an Assyrian church in Wakeley, where the boy allegedly stabbed Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel with a pocket knife, including in the eye, during the clerical leader’s service.
On Friday at Parramatta Children’s Court, Commonwealth prosecutors bemoaned another delay in the four teenagers’ case.
They are yet to enter pleas despite having been charged more than two years ago.
All four have been charged with conspiracy to commit a terror attack, and the defence successfully sought a three-week adjournment, to allow them time to respond to amendments to the prosecutor’s fact sheet.
Two of the four teenagers have been in custody since their 2024 arrest. On the previous occasion, where pleas were expected to be entered, a five-week adjournment was granted for the same reason.
The Telegraph revealed in April 2024 that investigators from the elite Joint Counter-Terrorism Team alleged the teenagers had made rudimental plans for an attack, which involved shotguns, safe houses, machetes and hunting knives, but were caught before they could put their alleged terror conspiracy into practice.
That alleged conspiracy was contained in messages between the teenagers on encrypted messaging app Signal, including in one group chat titled “plans”.
In a series of alleged messages, the boys discussed “targeting the yahud (Jewish people)” while some of them some expressed how they wanted to “die and kill”.
Contained in the police fact sheet, one of the teenagers allegedly said that he wanted to “do an attack now because I have so much hatred for these kufir (meaning ‘disbelievers’ in Arabic)”.
“I wanna do jihad now”, that teenager allegedly said.
Police had several of the boys under surveillance, with detailed accounts of their movements in the days after the Wakeley attack, before one of the teenager’s associates inadvertently tipped police off to the alleged Signal conversations.
That teenager was arrested in a separate incident for allegedly assaulting a bottle shop worker, where police took possession of his phone, which allegedly revealed the group’s conversations and terror conspiracy across their Signal conversations.
Little more a week after the Wakeley attack, police swooped: executing a raft of search warrants, arresting seven teenagers – including the four who appeared on Friday in Parramatta – and allegedly seized an array of knives, mobile phones, laptops, baton, hard drives, and two hand-drawn ISIS flags.
The four accused will next appear at court next month, where they are expected to enter pleas.