Ekip
05 May 2016•Update: 08 May 2016
By Jill Fraser
MELBOURNE, Australia
The most senior Australian fighting with Daesh has been killed in a United States air strike in Iraq.
Attorney-General George Brandis confirmed Thursday that Melbourne man Neil Prakash was killed in Mosul on Friday night, 29 April.
“Neil Prakash was the highest value target from an Australian point of view in the Middle East,” Brandis told Sky News television.
“He was the individual, more than any other, who had been actively inspiring and inciting domestic terrorism attacks within Australia. He had networks in both Melbourne and Sydney. He was very, very active until quite recently at least in social media. So if you want to describe him as Australia’s number one terrorist that wouldn’t be far from the mark.”
Prakash is reported to have been involved in foiled Anzac Day plots in Melbourne and Sydney, in influencing the thwarted “pipe bomb” massacre in Melbourne in May last year and in radicalising Numan Haider, the 18-year-old, who stabbed two police officers and was shot dead in Melbourne in September 2014 attack.
Anzac Day is a significant national holiday on April 25 that honors the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACS) who fought and died in Canakkale on Turkey's western coast in 1915.
Brandis also confirmed Thursday the death of Shadi Jabar Khalil Mohammad, the sister of 15-year-old Farhad Jabar, who shot dead New South Wale police accountant Curtis Cheng in Sydney in Oct. 2015 and was subsequently gunned down himself by police.
Channel Nine news reported that Mohammad died in a U.S. air strike on the Syrian city of Al Bab on April 22 alongside her Sudanese husband Abu Saad al-Sudani, according to the U.S. government.
The day before her brother was shot, Chen Mohammad boarded a flight to Singapore, and then a Syrian border country before he is believed to have headed for Syria or Iraq.
Brandis estimated that “about 110 Australians are actively engaged with ISIL [Daesh] as foreign fighters in the Middle East and in a variety of roles of course from being on the battlefield specifically to being engaged as Prakash had been in terror attack planning”.
Professor Greg Barton, a terrorism expert at Deakin University, told Fairfax that Prakash was the last known high-profile link between the Syria-Iraq battlefield and the extremist networks in Melbourne and Sydney.
Prakash's death is significant because he is reported to have no apparent Daesh recruiter in Australia succeeding him.
"His death is very welcome in that he's the last prominent Australian that we're aware of who served as a key link with friends back in Australia," Barton said.
