Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently revealed that Israeli intelligence had shared information with our security agencies that foiled an Islamic State plot to blow up an Etihad flight from Sydney last July.
Police arrested two brothers, Khaled Khayat and Mahmoud Khayat, and charged them with plotting to bring down the jet. They’re now before the courts accused of trying to smuggle an improvised explosive device hidden inside a meat grinder onto the plane. The attempt was aborted before they reached airport screening (the device was too heavy to pass through check-in).
The plot had been orchestrated by a senior commander of the Islamic State based in Syria, alarming our security agencies by demonstrating the ability of homegrown jihadis to access technical planning directly from terrorists in the Middle East. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has publicly thanked Israeli authorities for the intelligence tip off. He pointed out that Israel has an ‘enormous capacity’ within its intelligence community and it’s an ‘important relationship with ASIO and the Australian Federal Police’.
During his visit to Australia last February, Netanyahu pointed out that both states had ‘superb intelligence services’ that could be better if they worked more closely together to counter violent Islamist extremism.
Read the article by Anthony Bergin, a senior analyst at ASPI and senior research fellow at the ANU’s National Security College in The Strategist.