A man charged with torching a Melbourne synagogue, in an antisemitic attack that Australia accuses Iran of directing, was remanded in custody when he appeared in court Wednesday.
Younes Ali Younes, 20, became the second suspect last week to be charged for the December arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue.
Police allege three masked arsonists dowsed the building’s interior with a liquid accelerant before igniting it, causing extensive damage and injuring a worshipper.
Younes, who lives in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Wednesday by video link from jail.
His first court appearance came a day after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard of directing arson attacks on the synagogue and a Sydney kosher eatery, Lewis' Continental Kitchen, two months earlier.
Iran denied Australia’s allegations Tuesday through its Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, who tried to connect the attacks to the challenges the government faced with Israel after announcing Australia would recognize a Palestinian state.
No links to Iran have been reported from the court appearances of those charged so far over the Sydney and Melbourne blazes that the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) says it has “credible evidence” Iran orchestrated.
Younes, who spoke only twice during the brief hearing, was remanded in custody and ordered to appear again in court on Dec. 4.
Younes’ co-accused, Giovanni Laulu, a 21-year-old man from Melbourne’s western outskirts, will also appear in court on Dec. 4.
Laulu was arrested last month and remains behind bars. Both are charged with arson, reckless conduct endangering life and car theft. Arson carries a potential sentence of 15 years in prison. The other two charges are each punishable by 10 years in prison.
The crime was declared a terrorist act early in the investigation. Such a declaration increases resources available to the investigators.
No terrorism charges, which can carry longer prison sentences, have yet been laid.
Both suspects were charged by the Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team that brings together law enforcement officials from the state's Victoria Police, the Australian Federal Police and ASIO, the nation’s main domestic spy agency.
ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said Tuesday the Revolutionary Guard used a “complex web of proxies to hide its involvement” in the two antisemitic attacks in Australia.
Benjamin Klein, a board member of the damaged synagogue, said he had been warned by an official in the prime minister’s office that Iran would be blamed.
“It is quite shocking and traumatic to think that a peaceful, loving shule (synagogue) in Melbourne is targeted and attacked by terrorists from overseas,” Klein said.
Klein said state and federal authorities had been supportive with increased security at a temporary location where the synagogue’s congregation now gathers.
Iran link to Australian synagogue attack uncovered via funding trail, spy agency says
Australia's intelligence agency traced the funding of hooded criminals who allegedly set fire to a Melbourne synagogue, linking the antisemitic attack to Iran, officials said, even as those charged with the crime were likely unaware Tehran was their puppet master.
Security services in Britain and Sweden warned last year that Tehran was using criminal proxies to carry out its violent attacks in those countries, with London saying it had disrupted 20 Iran-linked plots since 2022. A dozen other countries have condemned what they called a surge in assassination, kidnapping, and harassment plots by Iranian intelligence services.
Australia's spy chief Mike Burgess said a series of "cut outs", an intelligence term for intermediaries, were used to conceal Iran's involvement in the attacks, and warned that it may have orchestrated others.
Security forces "have done rather extraordinary work to trace the source of the funding of these criminal elements who've been used as tools of the Iranian regime," Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday.
The investigation worked backwards through payments made onshore and offshore to "petty and sometimes not so petty criminals", he said in parliament on Wednesday.
Albanese was briefed by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation on Monday on evidence of a "supply chain" that he said linked the attacks to offshore individuals and Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Australia's diplomats in Iran were discreetly told to leave, making it out of Iranian airspace just after midnight, he said.
The turning point in the investigation came weeks earlier, as Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) seized mobile phones and digital devices from suspects arrested in Victoria state over the synagogue attack - and highlighted a stolen blue Volkswagen Golf sedan used in unrelated attacks.
CCTV footage of the night of December 6 released by police shows three hooded figures unloading red jerry cans of fuel from the boot of the car, one of whom was wielding an axe, at the entrance of the synagogue and setting it alight before speeding away.
Victoria's Joint Counter Terrorism Team alleged Younes stole the car to carry out the attack and recklessly endangered lives by setting fire to the A$20 million synagogue when people were inside, a charge sheet shows. No one was wounded in the attack.
Police have referred to the sedan as a "communal crime car" linked to other attacks that were not politically motivated.
Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, an advocacy group, said the owner of the targeted restaurant in Sydney was still processing news that the Revolutionary Guard had been accused of the arson.
“The fact that a business is targeted makes every Jewish Australian fearful that they could be next,” Ryvchin said.
Two Sydney men, Wayne Dean Ogden, 40, and Juon Amuoi, 26, have been charged with executing that attack and remain in custody.
Sayed Mohammed Moosawi, a 32-year-old Sydney-based former chapter president of the Nomads biker gang, has been charged with directing the fire bombing. He has been released on bail.
Since the onset of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, Australian homes, schools, synagogues, and vehicles have been targeted in antisemitic vandalism and arson, while Islamophobic incidents have also surged.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday continued to refuse to make public the specifics of how Iran had allegedly directed the two crimes, citing ongoing investigations into other antisemitic attacks.
Authorities say they also didn't want to jeopardize the fair trials of suspects already charged by making public evidence that might not be admissible in court.
“It’s very clear from the advice that we received from ASIO that both the Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Sydney and the Adass Israel Synagogue there in Melbourne were arisen from Iran, from the Iran Revolutionary Guard. And that is them working in concert with criminal elements both overseas and here domestically,” Albanese told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Australia is severing diplomatic ties with Iran over what Albanese described as an Iranian “attack on our social fabric and who we are.”
Iranian Ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi, the first ambassador to be expelled by Australia since World War II, was given 72 hours from Tuesday morning to leave Australia. Three of his fellow expelled Iranian diplomats were given a week to leave.
Sadeghi was seen leaving and returning to the embassy by car Wednesday.
Australia's Foreign Minister Penny Wong on Wednesday urged all Australians in Iran to leave immediately and warned travelers not to go there because Australia no longer had an embassy in Tehran. Australian diplomats had been moved to an unnamed third country for their own safety, she said.
“The Iranian regime is an unpredictable regime, a regime which we have seen is capable of aggression and violence,” Wong said.
Israeli government claims
Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said on Tuesday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "forthright intervention" and his criticisms against Australia's decision to recognise a Palestinian state may have triggered Australia's decision to expel Iranian diplomats.
"The relationship between this country and Australia was damaged, and so it's welcome that after Prime Minister Netanyahu's timely intervention that these actions have been taken by Australia's government," Mencer told reporters.
Netanyahu has personally attacked his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese, describing him as "a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia's Jews" over his decision to recognise a Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
"Complete nonsense," Burke said on Wednesday, when asked about Israel claiming credit for Australia's decision to order Sadeghi to leave the country.
"There was not a minute between us receiving this assessment and us starting to work through what we would do as a response."