NEWCASTLE, Australia (AP) — Muslim groups in Australia criticized Friday the disparity in police response to two stabbing attacks in Sydney this month, saying it had created a perception of a double standard and further alienated the country’s Muslim minority community.
The Australian National Imams Council said an attack on a shopping center in Bondi Junction was “quickly deemed a mental health issue”, while the stabbing of a Christian bishop in a Sydney church two days later was “almost immediately classified as a terrorist attack”. act was classified’.
“The differing treatments of two recent violent incidents are stark,” council spokesperson Ramia Abdo Sultan said in a statement with the Alliance of Australian Muslims and the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network.
“Such differences in response create the perception of a double standard in law enforcement and judicial processes,” she said.
A 16-year-old boy is accused of repeatedly stabbing Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and a priest at Christ the Good Shepherd Church on April 15, two days after the Bondi Junction attack that killed six people and seriously injured a dozen others hit. by a lone attacker with a history of mental illness.
The boy was charged last week with committing a terrorist act, a crime that carries a maximum life sentence.
Five teenage boys, aged 14 to 17, have also been charged with terrorist offenses in connection with the church stabbings. They were among seven arrested in a series of highly publicized raids in Sydney’s south-west during a major Joint Counter-Terrorism Team operation.
The boys, who are accused of following a violent extremist religious ideology, appeared in a Sydney children’s court on Thursday, with only the 14-year-old granted bail. He was still in custody on Friday pending an appeal.
Sultan called for an investigation into the processes leading to the police raids to ensure transparency and accountability within the justice system and prevent the marginalization of various ethnic and religious groups.
“We must also address the problematic and long-standing issue of racial and religious profiling, which has been part of the fabric of society for decades,” Sultan said. “The assumption that terrorism is inherently linked to religion is not only incorrect, but also harmful.”
New South Wales Premier Chris Minns agreed it was important that terrorism allegations were made correctly, but rejected any need for changes.
“The truth is that in some cases, and it is only a few cases where there is terrorist activity, it is the result of religious extremism,” Minns said at a news conference in Sydney on Friday.
Meanwhile, a Sydney university student settled his defamation claim against Australia’s Channel Seven network for wrongly identifying him as the attacker in the Bondi Junction shopping center attack.
Channel Seven had wrongly identified 20-year-old student Benjamin Cohen as the attacker after he was mentioned in several posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Police later identified the attacker as 40-year-old Joel Cauchi, who was shot and killed by the first responding police officer.
“Seven accepts that the identification was a serious mistake and that these claims were completely false and unfounded,” Seven CEO Jeff Howard said in a statement released by the Australian Broadcasting Corp on Friday.
He said Seven “apologizes to you for the harm you and your family have suffered as a result of Seven’s statements about you.”
Other details of the settlement have been kept confidential.
