No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  They met at a local mosque. Safi had started going soon after being released from detention. Harding was already part of the congregation (I’m not sure that’s the right word, but you know what I mean). They started talking, doubtless impressing each other with their jihad mumbo-jumbo.

  So, here were two people, one of whom had a grudge against the Australian government because nobody believed his story about his grandfather being part of an elite fighting force for the British; and the other an angry young man who had probably never had a girlfriend.

  It was Harding who decided to move into Safi’s house. As far as anyone can tell, he never asked anyone’s permission. There were empty rooms and he simply took one of them.

  He and Safi must have made quite a pair. Besides being up with all things Allah, both were into body building, and I’m told that when they lived in the house together, there were photographs of half-naked men – musclemen in silver G-strings – all over the walls.

  Both were gamers, which tends to go with the territory, and both were also convinced that the end of the world was nigh. Each had a copy of John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman’s SAS Survival Handbook. Within a year of becoming housemates, they’d stuffed the spare room with what police like to call a ‘prepper’s stash’ – camping gear and tinned food – to prepare themselves for the day of reckoning.

  They would spend hours on the weekend out in the bush, on Sydney’s outskirts, smearing camouflage on their faces and gluing twigs to their helmets, and practising that weird way of crawling across the bush floor, using only their arms, with their legs out behind them.

  They began compiling a second stash of fundamentalist viewing material: in total, they had 130 DVDs between them, mostly of Muslims being killed by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; and of the Twin Towers coming down on September 11. There were recorded messages from Osama bin Laden (this was before he was killed) and of ‘martyrs’ for al-Qaeda; they had videos of Americans being killed, cut up, strung from power lines; a downed US Apache helicopter; scenes from Black Hawk Down; the execution of foreign workers captured in Iraq, some of it so brutal and graphic police could barely look at it.

  On the other hand, they also had copies of Weekend at Bernie’s and Wayne’s World. So, besides sitting around plotting the end of Western civilisation, they seemed to have spent a fair bit of time singing the Wayne’s World anthem. At least one of them also had a thing for Pamela Anderson. Harding’s room had pictures of her in denim cut-offs, and in the famous red swimsuit, holding that red paddle thing.

  There’s no question that Harding and Safi dabbled in what might be termed ‘terrorist-related activities’ but as to whether they had enough brains between them to actually pull something off . . . that’s something I seriously doubt. They simply weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.

  In 2010, for example, Harding and Safi had experimented with making a bomb. We know this because they went to Midas, the car people, and tried to order an industrial-sized jerry can worth of battery acid and distilled water.

  The bloke who managed that particular franchise told them where they could get off, so they went to Bunnings hardware store in Mascot and picked up some acetone; they went to a different Bunnings to pick up some methylated spirits; then they walked into a Soul Pattinson chemist in Sydney’s west and asked to buy twenty-four bottles of hydrogen peroxide.

  The owner told them that he’d need to get it from the storeroom out the back, disappeared behind a curtain, and promptly call the cops.

  There are always things that you’d do differently with the benefit of hindsight and, obviously, the cops should have found something to charge them with on that occasion, but they didn’t.

  Maybe being let off with a warning emboldened them because the bomb-making didn’t stop. Throughout 2010, Harding and Safi made regular trips out to the State forests on the outskirts of Sydney, where they practised setting off homemade devices, filming the results, and putting videos of their handiwork up on YouTube. If you think that sounds like an odd way to spend your time, you want to go and look up the words ‘pipe bomb’ on YouTube: setting them off and taking videos of the damage is practically a national sport.

  People might think I’m naive when I say that I don’t believe any of this constitutes a real threat to national security, but I base that conclusion on conversations I had with two men who knew Harding and Safi quite well.

  One was the imam at the mosque they attended before they gave up going to the mosque on the grounds that it, too, had lost its way. There’s a coffee shop in Auburn – it’s one of those dowdy-looking places that serves Arabic coffee in small brown cups at laminate tables – and I met him there.

  He told me frankly that Harding was the kind of convert that troubles him.

  ‘Islam is a beautiful religion, and it’s a religion of peace,’ he said. ‘There are some men – and women – who come to the faith joyfully. On the other hand, there are converts – many of them poor, white men – who become obsessed with the jihad, and misinterpret what it means deliberately.

  ‘Harding was in that category. It is not for me to say that we did not want him, but I did not want him. I did not believe that he knew enough to convert to Islam.’

  I asked the imam whether he believed that either Harding or Safi had it in them to launch a terrorist attack against the West. He scoffed.

  ‘There are hardline, dangerous people in this community,’ he said. ‘People who have been to Pakistan or fought in Chechnya – people who have taken up arms against Australian troops in Afghanistan. These two were not those people. These two could not find followers.’

  I also spoke to Harding’s father. He didn’t really want to go on the record, other than to say, ‘Our Brian was always a bit odd.’ He sighed as he told me how difficult Brian had been as a kid, unable to make friends, ‘for no reason other than he was damn annoying. Just would not shut up. Drove everybody to distraction. It would get to the point that everyone in the school wanted to punch him in the mouth and I couldn’t blame them.

  ‘The principal told me, he’s only ever going to work with his hands. That’s not a bad thing, but he’d start one course and then start another. I told him, just go to the mines! You can make $100,000 a year just driving a truck! Get a mortgage, settle down, marry a nice girl, have a few kids.

  ‘But not our Brian. He had to make a damn fool of himself instead.’

  That wasn’t the way the media saw it. On the contrary, there was almost nothing in the media after the siege at Surf City other than stories suggesting that ‘this could have been our 9/11 . . . this could have been our Bali bombing . . . there’s no doubt that at least one charismatic Islamic fundamentalist – a homegrown convert who had infiltrated a local mosque and gathered supporters there – was behind it.’

  The reporters who wrote those stories never met Brian Harding.

  What actually happened was that Ali Khan was taken from the Red Cross hostel after all those years in detention and dumped into a house with two fruitcakes, one of whom – Harding – wasn’t even supposed to be there.

  Ali Khan arrived just as Harding had cooked up a plan to rob a bank.

  Harding and Safi would later claim they needed the money to fund trips to a Taliban training camp in Afghanistan, where they could live as pure Muslims, and ultimately take up arms against Australian soldiers.

  I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see the money disappear into online porn sites.

  In any case, they didn’t want to rob the bank themselves. They wanted somebody else to do it. The risk of getting caught was high and, if they were caught, they wouldn’t be able to martyr themselves by taking out infidels.

  You can imagine their joy when two officers from DIMIA walked up the path with Ali Khan in tow.

  Here was somebody they could send in for them.

  There are still people who think Ali Khan must have been in on it. They’ll never be convinced otherwise. All I can say is: I’ve seen no evidence to persuad
e me that was the case, and Wolf doesn’t believe it, either.

  Ali Khan’s fingerprints weren’t on the dog-eared map of Sydney – the UBD – that cops found in the glove box of Harding’s car, nor were they on either of the freshly opened Passiona bottles the cops found, rolling around in the front seat, which suggests that Ali Khan wasn’t a willing passenger on the journey to Surf City.

  Evidence from various traffic cameras suggests that Harding’s car – a plain white van – left the driveway of the Auburn house shortly after 7 am.

  In terms of staging a robbery, that’s a dumb time to leave. It means you’re going to get caught in Sydney traffic pretty much as soon as you back out of your driveway.

  It would have been torture, crawling along at five kilometres an hour, getting stopped at every light, with Harding behind the wheel, Safi in the passenger seat and Ali Khan wedged in the middle, with the shoeshine box already strapped to his neck.

  There isn’t much doubt that he was made to put it on before he was shoved into the van. Mouse has described the device pretty well but it was basically a tin box with a pipe-bomb hidden inside, strapped around Ali Khan’s neck with chains that were in turn held together with the U-shaped bike lock.

  Maybe for Ali Khan’s comfort, they’d put a towel around his neck first and the box was resting on that. Then they’d put the hoodie on him and zipped it up to his neck.

  It took almost two hours for them to get to Bondi. The rain didn’t help. Still, Surf City was only just opening when they first drove past the main entrance, and that was no good. They needed some staff on deck in the bank to open the safe.

  I’d say it was Harding, the driver, who made a decision to start circling. The van at one point came quite close to my flat. I remember sitting in the coroner’s inquest, looking at the pictures of the van stopped at different traffic lights, thinking how close they’d come to where I lived.

  At one point, they made like they were going to enter the car park on Campbell Parade where I’d parked, too, but you’ve got to get a ticket from the barrier to do that, so they reversed out and resumed their lap of the beach.

  They made it back to Surf City shortly before 9.30 am. The CCTV shows the van parked with one wheel up on the kerb outside the main entrance, with three people in the front cabin squished up against one another.

  Ali Khan was so small, he might have been a child sitting between two grown men.

  The driver’s door opened, and Harding, who was the taller of the two, stepped out. Like Ali Khan, he also had a hoodie on and his face was obscured. He reached into the the van, took Ali Khan by the shoulders and dragged him around the back of the van, toward the footpath.

  Ali Khan was looking down at his feet. He didn’t resist but he didn’t cooperate, either. He’s not exactly limp like a doll: that would suggest that his knees were close to giving way; in fact he appeared to be quite steady on his feet.

  The two of them stood on the footpath. Harding fiddled with the tin box on Ali Khan’s chest for a moment, like he was checking that everything was in order. They exchanged no words. Then Harding gave Ali Khan a pat on the chest and turned him – literally turned him, using Ali Khan’s shoulders like the handles on a motorbike – toward Surf City’s main entrance and shoved him toward the door.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I‘ve talked a lot about Ali Khan and how he came to find himself holed up in a lingerie shop at Surf City. Maybe you’re thinking: that’s all very well but the people who were trapped in there with him must have been terrified.

  I don’t deny it. They were terrified.

  You might also be thinking: once Ali Khan got himself free of Harding, why didn’t he go straight to police?

  I’ve wondered that, too, and my best guess is that once Ali Khan found himself inside Surf City, his aim was simply to get out. Once he found himself locked in Cups and Saucy, that was no longer an option. Foto had locked the door. The shop was very quickly surrounded by police who were armed. I can’t know what Ali Khan made of the appearance of so many personnel dressed in black canvas, wearing helmets, carrying the kind of weaponry he probably hadn’t seen since the refugee camp, but I think we can be sure that he, too, was terrified.

  I accept that he at no point attempted to surrender.

  That said, at no stage did he make an actual threat to anyone. He wasn’t waving a weapon around or making threats. I know, I know – surely sitting there with a bomb strapped to his neck was enough of a threat?

  Maybe, but Ali Khan was sitting as I’ve described, with his back to the glass door and his feet straight out in front of him. His head was slumped forward, and it looked to me like his chin was resting on his chest but I suppose it was actually resting on the shoeshine box around his neck.

  For some reason, that gave me comfort. Surely he wouldn’t rest his face against something that was about to explode?

  I had a fairly good view of the other people in the shop, too. Mouse stayed close to the counter, standing up in her furry slippers. Roger Callaghan stayed well back. Mitchell and Kimmi K stayed on the floor.

  ‘I didn’t want to take my eyes off the thing he had around his neck,’ Mouse told me. ‘If anything was going to happen to it – if it was going to start to tick or if smoke was going to start to come off it, I wanted to know. I kept looking at him to see what he was thinking. But he didn’t seem interested in making eye contact with me or anyone else. Of the three hours we were in there, I would say that he had his eyes closed for most of that time. Only occasionally, he’d get frantic. He’d start lifting the box off his chest as if he was trying to get it up and over his head.

  ‘He’d take it with his two hands, and, like, lift it off his chest. It would make this horrific sloshing sound, and the smell of petrol would just come out over everything. And every time he touched it, his hands would get more greasy and black and I knew it must be leaking, which was freaking me out.

  ‘I was saying to him, “We’ve all got mobile phones. I’ve got one, these people have probably got one.” Because you know that old story about how if a phone rings and you’re filling up your car, you can blow the whole service station? I was thinking, if that thing is leaking petrol and the police ring one of our mobile phones, it might spark it.

  ‘He didn’t seem to care. He seemed to just want to get it off. But the way it was attached – the box had these heavy, dirty chains welded to it, and the chains went around his neck, and they were hooked together at the back with the bike lock – I could see there was no way to get it off, not without opening the bike lock. It was on too tight to go over his head.

  ‘So he’d try it for a while, and then he’d kind of give up. It was like, you know . . .’ – here, she sucked her cheeks in and popped her eyes out – ‘he’d give one more big effort, and then he’d give up, until the next time. I was really freaking out at one point, saying, “Can you just stop moving?”

  ‘Because I couldn’t make sense of it. Why would he be trying to get it off, after he’d gone to all the trouble of putting it on? Why would you come into a shopping centre with that thing hooked around your neck and then be trying to get away from it? Unless he’d changed his mind and didn’t want anything do with whatever he’d been planning after all? In which case, why not throw your hands in the air and surrender?

  ‘The other thing I couldn’t work out was what police were doing. Like now, I can see that police were working on a way to get us out; they were trying to keep everything calm and figure out how to handle it, but at the time, I was thinking, why isn’t anyone doing anything?’

  I asked Mouse what the others in the shop were doing as Ali Khan made his strange moves.

  ‘The school kid, Mitchell, was sitting really close to Kimmi,’ she said. ‘He had his arm around her, a bit awkward, like kids do when they’re trying to comfort grown-ups. He was saying, “It’s okay,” and “It’s alright,” in a soft voice, because she was crying, only softly, but crying.

  ‘She had her k
nees up under her chin, and her face in her hands. I don’t think she looked up much the whole time. Her boss told me later – her boss at Cute Nails – she didn’t speak very much English. I can’t remember her saying anything, actually.’

  And Roger Callaghan?

  ‘He was the type who stood at the back, watching what was going on,’ Mouse said, with contempt in her voice.

  ‘I had a feeling he was working on some kind of plan. Like, you could see his mind was ticking. I thought, okay, he’s working something out. He’s figuring out the details. I was getting ready to do what he suggested, you know, just waiting on him to give the word.

  ‘But he only said one thing to me, really. He said, “I bet the police are making plans to take him by surprise.”

  ‘He whispered it. He said, “The corridor behind the shops, the one they use to take all the rubbish out – they’ll be coming through that back door any minute.’”

  Police had in fact considered coming down the secret corridors behind the shops and bursting through the back door (there are secret corridors behind the shops in most shopping centres; it’s how the shopkeepers get rid of rubbish and accept deliveries). They had considered a few other strategies, too. They were wondering whether to blast the room with music, in an effort to rattle Ali Khan. They could push a stupefying gas through the air-conditioning system; everyone would pass out, including Ali Khan. All are pretty old-school devices for dealing with hostage-takers. There’s risks with all of them – that Ali Khan might produce a gun and shoot somebody – but given what we now know, and hindsight being a wonderful thing, those were risks they should have taken.

  Wolf agrees with me about that.

  The strategy they decided on was to go with trained negotiators. At the forefront of Wolf’s mind was the fact that Ali Khan was young, and Cate had made the case that he’d already been dealt a pretty rough hand. It would be good to try to get him out alive.

  The negotiators were saying things like, ‘We know your story, Mr Khan.’ He showed no surprise about the fact that they’d figured out his name. They said, ‘We’d like to help you. We’d like to get you safely out of there. We’d like to get everybody safely out.’