In Perth, a city on Australia’s west coast, a 16-year-old kid with a knife stabbed a guy before being shot by police.
The incident happened on Saturday night in the suburban Willetton hardware store parking lot.
Premier Roger Cook of Western Australia told reporters on Sunday that the adolescent had attacked the man and then dashed towards police officers before being shot.
“It appears he was radicalised on the internet,” Mr. Cook stated at a press conference.
He continued, “But at this point, I want to reassure the community that it appears that he acted solely and alone.”
At the site, a man in his 30s was discovered suffering from a back stab wound. According to a police statement, he was transported to a hospital in a serious but stable condition.
Since another 16-year-old kid attacked an Assyrian Orthodox bishop and priest in a church on April 15, police and operatives from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) have been conducting a counterterrorism investigation in Sydney, a city on the east coast.
The boy is accused of carrying out a terrorist act. Along with him, six of his alleged friends have been charged with a variety of offences, including plotting or organising a terrorist act.
“We are a peace-loving nation and there is no place for violent extremism in Australia,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said after receiving briefings on the most recent stabbing in Perth from Australian federal police commissioner Reece Kershaw and ASIO director-general Mike Burgess, who oversees the country’s primary domestic spy agency. “I’m advised there is no ongoing threat to the community on the information available,” Mr. Albanese said. “The boy was involved in a programme for young people at risk of radicalization,” Western Australian police commissioner Col Blanch said.
The boy had been enrolled in a programme for young people at risk of radicalization, according to Western Australian Police Commissioner Col Blanch. “I don’t want to say he has been radicalised or is radicalised because I think that forms part of the investigation,” Mr. Blanch said. Later, police received a call from a member of the public reporting that a knife attack was taking place in the parking lot. Three police officers responded, one of whom was armed with a gun and the other two of whom were armed with tasers. Two of the officers used their tasers, but they were unable to incapacitate the boy before he was killed
Before the boy’s death on Saturday, Mr. Blanch said, members of the local Muslim community had voiced concerns to the police regarding his behaviour.
The biggest mosque in Perth, the Nasir Mosque, has an imam who denounced the stabbing.
According to a statement issued by Imam Syed Wadood Janud, “violence has no place in Islam.”
“We value the efforts made by the police to maintain the safety of our neighbourhoods. Mr. Wadood continued, “I also want to thank the Muslim community in the area for having previously reported the person to the authorities.
Some Muslim leaders have criticised Australian police for declaring last month’s church stabbing a terrorist act but not a rampage two days earlier in a Sydney shopping mall in which six people were killed and a dozen wounded.
The 40-year-old attacker in the mall attack was shot dead by police. Police have yet to reveal the man’s motive.
The church attack is only the third to be classified by Australian authorities as a terrorist act since 2018.
In December 2022, three Christian fundamentalists shot dead two police officers and a bystander in an ambush near the community of Wieambilla in Queensland state. The attackers were later killed by police.
In November 2018, a Somalia-born Muslim stabbed three pedestrians in downtown Melbourne, killing one, before police shot him dead.