ASIO’s pre-emptive attack on a Four Corners investigation into the Bondi killings was vague, thinly evidenced and ultimately counter-productive.

The ASIO Director, Mike Burgess, has taken a lot of trouble to praise himself and his organisation for their part in “keeping Australians safe”. Yet the disjunction between these inbred encomiums and whether something might have been missed in the advent to the Bondi atrocity may have left Burgess and ASIO more than usually sensitive. Boasting is risky.

On 8 February, ASIO issued a formal statement claiming that a ABC Four Corners program to be run on the following day contained “serious errors of fact”. Unfortunately the statement was ambiguous and light on evidence. If ASIO should last for a thousand years, few might say that this was its finest hour.

The Four Corners program included interviews with a former ASIO “agent”, code-named Marcus. The agent says he “infiltrated Sydney’s Islamic State network for six years” and mixed with a range of people associated with a Street Dawah in Bankstown which contained Islamic State supporters of various radical hues, some of whom have had trouble with the law.

Marcus says that in 2019 the accused Bondi murderer, Naveed Akram, was introduced to the Street Dawah and that he met Naveed “on a regular basis, face to face over many years”. Marcus........

© Pearls and Irritations