Australia  Police: 2 men planned ‘imminent’ terror attack

Two men were charged yesterday with planning to launch an imminent terrorist attack in Australia, after police seized a homemade flag associated with the Islamic State group, a machete and a hunting knife in a counterterrorism raid.
The men, aged 24 and 25, would have carried out the attack on Tuesday if they had not been arrested that day in the raid in the Sydney suburb of Fairfield, New South Wales state Deputy Police Commissioner Catherine Burn told reporters.
A video that was seized during the raid showed one of the men making threats, though Burn declined to detail exactly what was said. Australian Attorney General George Brandis later told the Senate that the video depicted one of the suspects kneeling in front of the Islamic State flag with the knife and machete while making a politically motivated statement and threatening to commit “violent acts” with those weapons.
The men planned to launch their attack in western Sydney, he said.
Asked whether they were planning a beheading, Burn replied, “We don’t really know what act they were going to commit.”
“What we are going to allege is consistent with the IS messaging,” she said, using an abbreviation for the Islamic State group. “We believe that the men were potentially going to harm somebody, maybe even kill somebody, and potentially using one of the items that we identified and recovered yesterday, potentially a knife.”
Police were trying to determine whether the men were in contact with anyone from the Islamic State movement.
“Yesterday, our focus was to act on information that we received about something that was imminent,” Burn said. “We believe that we have stopped that threat from occurring. However, there are further investigations that now we will need to follow through.”
Omar Al-Kutobi and Mohammad Kiad were charged with undertaking acts in preparation or planning for a terrorist act, which carries a maximum punishment of life in prison. Their lawyer didn’t apply for bail and it was formally refused during a brief court hearing yesterday. Neither man appeared in the courtroom.
Police don’t believe there is any link between the alleged plot and another plot that prompted a series of counterterror raids in Sydney in September.  Kristen Gelineau, Sydney, AP