This article examines documented patterns and raises questions for the Royal Commission. It does not assert that any individual committed criminal acts beyond those for which they have been convicted. The individuals discussed are entitled to the presumption of innocence regarding any conduct not proven in court.
In part 1, I documented the network that radicalised Naveed Akram—the Al Madina Dawah Centre, the street preachers, the ISIS-aligned ideology he absorbed between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. This part examines the systemic failures that allowed three other figures to operate freely—and whether they facilitated the worst terrorist attack in Australian history.
The Courtroom
September 2021. Sydney. Youssef Uweinat—the youth leader who recruited teenagers to Islamic State at Wissam Haddad’s centre—stood before Justice Geoffrey Bellew in the NSW Supreme Court.
“I have completely renounced my membership of IS and any other terrorist organisation.”
He was twenty-three years old. He’d been recruited at fourteen by street preachers, spent years teaching the ideology that got teenagers killed in Syria, and now stood before a judge performing rehabilitation.
He’d read the Koran independently, he said. Realized Islamic State “only used sections to justify their actions.” Called their interpretation “barbaric.”
A prison chaplain testified he “was no longer a religious extremist and posed no risk to society.”
Justice Bellew found him “genuinely contrite.” But the judge also noted something else: an expert’s opinion that Uweinat’s beliefs “could re-emerge”—particularly if he was “reunited with his former network.”
The Press Conference
November 2022. Canberra. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess stood before reporters and declared victory.
For the first time since September 2014, Australia’s national terrorism threat level was lowered: from PROBABLE to POSSIBLE. “The threat from religiously motivated violent extremists has moderated,” Burgess explained. “Dissipated, not disappeared.”
Burgess came from signals intelligence. Eighteen years at the Australian Signals Directorate. Breaking communications. Tracing cryptocurrency. His expertise was technical—ones and zeroes, the quantifiable. The slower work of human intelligence—watching a preacher radicalise teenagers, understanding that ideology can lie dormant then activate—was not his forte.
ASIO pivoted toward what Burgess knew: foreign interference, state-based threats, cyber operations. Islamic extremism was deprioritised.
The Collision
The same month Burgess declared the threat “dissipated,” Uweinat walked free.
No ankle bracelet. No curfew. No banned contacts. The government’s supervision application—filed six days before his release—had failed.
The expert had warned: “his beliefs could re-emerge if reunited with his former network.”
Within weeks, he was back at Haddad’s centre.
The Test
August 2025. The Sydney Harbour Bridge, closed to traffic. One hundred thousand protesters streaming toward the Opera House.
And above the crowd, on the steel arch—Youssef Uweinat. Face wrapped in a keffiyeh. Waving the black shahada flag.
ABC cameras captured it. Haddad was there beside him. Working together. Broadcasting their message.
Haddad posted an approving message: “The only flag that counts!”
Police watched. They didn’t arrest him.
The expert’s warning had proved prescient. The system had believed in his transformation. It had not endured.
And now Uweinat was back with the network—in public, on the bridge, four months before the Akrams flew to the Philippines.
This is the story of three men who may have facilitated that attack—and the intelligence, policing, and legal failures that allowed them to operate freely for years.
The system knew about all of them. It watched. It documented. It failed to act.
Note: On 22 December 2025, AFP Commissioner Barrett stated that “there is no evidence to suggest these alleged offenders were part of a broader terrorist cell, or were directed by others to carry out an attack.” The question this article examines is different: not whether Akram was directed by the network, but whether the network’s infrastructure—its ideology, its contacts, its pathways—facilitated what he did.
The Commander
Part 1 documented El Matari’s ideology—his vision of a rural insurgency modelled on the Philippines, his claim to command “a thousand boys of DAWLA State.” What matters here is what Supermax didn’t stop.
El Matari kept writing. The prison couldn’t contain his influence—only his body.
May 2020. Three letters seized from Youssef Uweinat’s cell—addressed to Uweinat’s jihadi name: “Abu Musa al-Maqdisi.” El Matari wasn’t on Uweinat’s approved association list. The letters reached him anyway.
September 2019. Police found a three-page letter El Matari had written to fellow inmate Tukiterangi Lawrence. The letter laid out operational doctrine:
“a small enclosed battalion to exploit the exposed landscape, taking to remote regional areas to plan the orchestration of attacks.”
Lawrence called it a “beautiful letter” and agreed with the insurgency plans.
He also wrote to Joseph Saadieh. In June 2021, police found 26 explosive-related files on Saadieh’s devices. Court documents stated the recipes were generally viable—JCTT expert analysis confirmed all processes contained within the images would work.
Not just ISIS ideology. Working bomb recipes. In the hands of someone connected to El Matari. Four years before Bondi.
In one letter to Saadieh, El Matari wrote that he anticipated “you’ll soon join them in Goulburn’s Supermax.” His correspondence reached prisoners who possessed bomb-making materials—a pattern that raises serious questions about what Supermax actually contained.
Supermax didn’t isolate El Matari. It gave him time to write doctrine, distribute bomb-making instructions, and maintain the network. The AFP is now reportedly considering a control order before his scheduled release in November 2026—seven years after his letters first reached the outside.
The Switchboard
Part 1 documented the Al Madina Dawah Centre—the 25 antisemitic imputations found by the Federal Court, the ISIS flag and machete found in Haddad’s home in 2015, ASIO informant Marcus calling it “an ISIL camp.” What matters here is why nothing was done.
On 23 December 2025—nine days after Bondi—the Sydney Morning Herald reported what investigators had said privately for years: Haddad was “a good intel source.”
If accurate, this suggests a calculation was made: that his intelligence value outweighed his danger as a radicaliser.
But what information, if any, flowed the other direction?
If Haddad was providing intelligence to police, questions arise about what he may have learned in return—which individuals were being investigated, which investigations were closing down, which targets police had deprioritised. When ASIO Director-General Burgess declared in November 2022 that the threat from Islamic extremism had “dissipated,” the signal was public: the government’s focus had shifted.
Haddad kept operating. Whether he exploited any intelligence relationship remains unknown.
Wissam Haddad was never charged with terrorism. But he appears on every control order examined—Dakkak, Biber, Church, Amin. Released extremists forbidden from contacting him.
Yet free to receive them.
When Abdul Nacer Benbrika—Australia’s first convicted terrorism network leader—was released December 2023, AFP surveillance documented his communications with Haddad. Days later, they met.
When Uweinat was released November 2022, he reunited with Haddad within weeks.
Haddad wasn’t the commander. He functioned as a hub—released extremists gravitated toward him. And police, for reasons never publicly explained, did not charge him.
After the ABC aired the Four Corners investigation in April 2025, Haddad responded to allegations with a telling statement: “If I am a leader of violent extremism, why is it that people on the grapevine are saying these words, but law enforcement don’t have the same information?”
The question answers itself—if the SMH report is accurate, charging him would mean burning their asset.
Eight months later, fifteen people died at Bondi.
Haddad’s lawyer has stated that “no evidence had been produced showing any personal, organizational, or instructional link” between Haddad and Naveed Akram. Whether the ideological infrastructure Haddad built constitutes “facilitation”—and whether police protection of an asset enabled a massacre—is a question the Royal Commission may ultimately address.
The Link
Part 1 documented Uweinat’s role: recruited at fourteen by street preachers, became a youth leader at Haddad’s centre, convicted for recruiting teenagers to ISIS. The question here is what happened after his release.
More than 60 per cent of convicted Islamic State-era terrorists are found not to be contrite. Fewer than one in four reform.
Justice Bellew found Uweinat “genuinely contrite.” He also noted an expert’s opinion that Uweinat’s beliefs “could re-emerge.” And those three letters from El Matari found in his cell.
November 2022. Uweinat walked free. No supervision—the government’s application was filed six days before release. It failed.
The judge had warned he might return to terrorism “if reunited with his former network.”
The reunion happened immediately. ABC confirmed: Uweinat reconnected with Haddad. Joined The Dawah Van. Distributed ISIS propaganda including “Inside the Khilafah”—featuring ISIS operations in Mindanao, the Philippines.
August 3, 2025. The Sydney Harbour Bridge, closed to traffic. One hundred thousand protesters streaming toward the Opera House. And above the crowd, on the steel arch—Youssef Uweinat, face wrapped in a keffiyeh, waving the black shahada flag.
The Failures
After the 2024 IRGC attacks on Jewish targets in Sydney and Melbourne, ASIO proved what it had become good at: seized devices, traced cryptocurrency to Tehran, mapped international networks, identified the Quds Force commander.
Impressive attribution. But the kosher deli had already burned. The synagogue had already burned. Zero deaths wasn’t intelligence work—the criminals hit the wrong venue twice. The Adass Israel Synagogue was nearly empty at 4:10am.
Zero deaths was luck. ASIO had become very good at explaining attacks after they happened. Less good at preventing them.
Continuing Detention Orders
Continuing Detention Orders (CDOs) were Parliament’s answer to a specific problem: what happens when a convicted terrorist finishes their sentence but remains dangerous?
Enacted under Division 105A of the Criminal Code following the 2005 London bombings, CDOs allow the Attorney-General to apply to keep high-risk terrorism offenders detained beyond their prison term—indefinitely, if necessary. The threshold is “unacceptable risk”: if a court finds the offender poses an unacceptable risk of committing a serious terrorism offence, they can be held even after their sentence expires. It is the strongest tool in Australia’s post-sentence terrorism framework. Since Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus took office, it has been used exactly zero times.
The Legal Failure
The post-sentence terrorism framework rests on identifying who poses “unacceptable risk.” The tool used to assess that risk—VERA-2R—can’t predict it. A government report found its predictive validity bordered on worthless. No better than flipping a coin. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton buried the report. For three years, government lawyers used VERA-2R in court while knowing it couldn’t predict risk.
Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth called the suppression “a disgrace” and “serious interference with the administration of justice.”
But the framework has a deeper problem: it only captures convicted offenders. Division 105A cannot touch Haddad—never convicted of terrorism, free to operate. Cannot touch Abdullah Azari—on every prohibited contact list, never charged, cannot be supervised.
The architecture captures the convicted while missing the connected.
Preventative detention powers—enacted after the 2005 London bombings—were used exactly once in 17 years. Police never wrote procedures to implement them. The alternative is surveillance. New Zealand tried that. September 2021: Ahamed Samsudeen, under active surveillance, walked into an Auckland supermarket. Ninety seconds. Eight injured.
The supervision orders that do get applied don’t work either. Sixty-four per cent of released extremists breach their conditions. London Bridge, Streatham, Vienna—three attacks by released extremists on supervision.
The Administrative Failure
In April 2021, police conducting routine supervision checks on Moudasser Taleb—a convicted ISIS sympathizer from the same Street Dawah network as Naveed Akram—discovered him in possession of an illegally modified sawn-off shotgun.
Taleb was under an Extended Supervision Order. He had police monitoring. And he still obtained an illegal weapon.
The system couldn’t even stop extremists it was actively watching.
At Senate Estimates in February 2024—ten months before Bondi—Senator Michaelia Cash laid out the pattern:
“...for Mr Uweinat [the CDO application] was six days before the sentence expired and, in relation to Mr Cerantonio, Mr Benbrika and Mr Al Maouie, there was no application for a post-sentence order at all.”
Four convicted terrorists. Four failures. Every release date was known years in advance.
The strongest tool for keeping dangerous offenders detained—unused entirely. Even when applications were made, they came so late that courts had no time for thorough review. Filing six days before release virtually guarantees failure.
“Does a terrorist risk magically disappear at the 28-day mark?” Cash asked. “Why wouldn’t you follow it up?”
The Department’s explanation: “When responsibility for doing the HRTO work came across to the Attorney-General’s Department, there was very limited resourcing and capability in that area.”
August 2025. A journalist confronted Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley:
“Pictures have emerged of a convicted ISIS youth recruiter, Youssef Uweinat, forcefully confronting a protester and waving a black flag at the Sydney Harbour Bridge protest—who walked free from jail two years ago after the Federal Government’s bid for a terrorism supervision order failed. Should he have been released without any supervision?”
Ley responded:
“Look, I appreciate your question, but I’m not going to answer it in detail until I’ve been fully briefed on what entirely has happened in what context.”
So, the Opposition Leader—when directly asked about a convicted ISIS recruiter waving a black flag at a protest and reuniting with the preacher who radicalised him—said she “hadn’t heard the details” and wouldn’t comment until “fully briefed.”
Four months before Bondi. A journalist was asking the right questions. Neither side of politics had answers.
The CDO system was designed for exactly these cases: offenders who pose unacceptable risk even after serving their sentences. Parliament created it. Funded it. The executive branch chose not to use it.
The system didn’t fail because the tools were inadequate—though they are. The system failed because the people responsible for using the tools chose not to use them.
Twenty-Eight Days
November 2025. The Akrams booked flights to the Philippines.
Original plan: arrive November 14. Then they changed the booking. Flew two weeks earlier. November 1.
Why the change?
On November 14-15—the exact dates they were originally supposed to land—Philippine forces killed Najib Laguindab, alias Abu Jihad, sub-leader of Dawlah Islamiyah-Maute Group. One of the region’s most wanted.
The timing is too precise to dismiss. The Akrams changed their booking to arrive before the operation that killed Laguindab. Either they had foreknowledge that the situation in Mindanao was deteriorating—intelligence that could only come from network contacts—or the coincidence is extraordinary.
Someone told them to change the dates. Who?
This was not a random destination.
El Matari’s doctrine: “The brothers in the Philippines have achieved great success.” Musa Cerantonio arrested attempting to reach Mindanao. Dakkak’s control order explicitly banned him from travelling to the Philippines.
Three weeks after Laguindab’s death, December 7, Philippine forces killed Mohammad Usman Solaiman—Dawlah Islamiyah’s master bomb maker. Solaiman had built IEDs for years. His devices killed Philippine soldiers and civilians across Mindanao.
Two ISIS leaders eliminated in three weeks. A bomb maker. A sub-commander. In the region where the Akrams spent 28 days.
Three weeks after returning to Australia, Naveed Akram walked onto Bondi Beach with five IEDs.
The devices didn’t detonate. But someone had taught him how to build them—and here the timeline becomes significant.
The Theory
The Akrams went to the Philippines to learn bomb-making. Solaiman—Dawlah Islamiyah’s master bomb maker, the man who had built IEDs for years—was operating in the same region. On December 7, Philippine forces killed him. One week later, the Akrams attacked Bondi with five devices that were assessed as “viable” but failed to detonate.
If Solaiman or someone in his network was training the Akrams, his death may explain why their devices didn’t work. They learned enough to build viable bombs—but their instructor was killed before they mastered the craft. The training was cut short. The IEDs were functional in design but flawed in execution.
This would explain the gap between “viable” and “effective.” The Akrams returned with incomplete knowledge. Enough to build devices that experts assessed as genuine threats. Not enough to build devices that actually detonated.
If even one IED had functioned as designed, at a gathering of 1,000 people, the death toll would have been catastrophic.
Investigations have also revealed that in October 2025—before the Philippines trip—police video shows father and son conducting firearms training at a rural NSW property near Goulburn. Firearms capability was acquired domestically. But the Akrams didn’t travel to the Philippines to learn to shoot. They already knew how.
They went for something else. And three weeks after the region’s master bomb maker was killed, they attacked with bombs.
The question isn’t whether the Akrams visited the Philippines. The question is what happened there, who made the introductions—and whether Philippine counter-terrorism operations inadvertently prevented a far worse massacre by eliminating the instructor before the students had finished learning.
The Facilitation Chain
The AFP says there is “no evidence” of a “broader terrorist cell” or that the Akrams were “directed by others.” This may be true in the narrow operational sense. But facilitation can take forms that fall short of direction:
- Ideological infrastructure that frames targets and justifies violence
- Contacts and pathways that enable travel and training
- Networks that maintain connection while principals are incarcerated
Consider what the documented evidence actually shows:
El Matari has not stopped. Lebanese prison didn’t stop him—he networked with ISIS members there. Supermax didn’t stop him either. He wrote letters to Lawrence laying out operational doctrine. He wrote letters to Uweinat—circumventing the approved association list to reach a fellow extremist using his jihadi name. He wrote to Saadieh, who had 26 “generally viable” bomb-making files on his devices. This is not the conduct of someone who has renounced anything. This is someone whose methods adapted to his environment.
Uweinat’s transformation did not hold. He told Justice Bellew he had “completely renounced” ISIS. He called their interpretation “barbaric.” The chaplain said he posed “no risk to society.” The court found him “genuinely contrite.” Within weeks of release, he was back with Haddad. By August 2025, he was standing on the Sydney Harbour Bridge waving an ISIS-associated flag alongside Haddad, in front of 100,000 people. This is not a man who reformed. This is a man who said what he needed to say to walk free—and immediately resumed what he’d been convicted of doing.
Haddad never stopped. The centre kept running. The released extremists kept arriving. Benbrika—Australia’s first convicted terrorism network leader—communicated with Haddad days after his December 2023 release. Even met him in person. Uweinat reunited with him within weeks. Whatever calculation led police not to charge Haddad—the answer may emerge at the Royal Commission.
Someone made the introductions. The Akrams didn’t randomly select the Philippines. El Matari’s doctrine celebrated “the brothers in the Philippines.” Dakkak’s control order explicitly banned Philippine contacts. Uweinat distributed Mindanao-specific ISIS content after his release. The network had documented connections there—connections the courts recognised as serious enough to prohibit.
Either the Akrams independently discovered and arranged contact with ISIS-linked figures in Mindanao, or someone from the network made the introduction.
The former strains credulity. The latter fits the documented pattern: El Matari providing doctrine and contacts from Supermax, Uweinat carrying information between prison and the outside world, Haddad connecting everyone who came through his centre.
The facilitation chain:
- El Matari provided the doctrine and the Philippines contacts
- His letters reached Uweinat in prison, circumventing approved association lists
- Uweinat distributed Philippines-specific content after release
- Uweinat was released without monitoring because the government filed six days late
- Uweinat’s claimed rehabilitation did not hold—he immediately rejoined the network
- The network maintained connection through Haddad 2022–2025
- Akram was connected to all three (intelligence reporting, court documents)
- Akram travelled to the Philippines, met unknown “religious leaders,” and looking to develop his IED capability
- The region’s master bomb maker was killed one week before the attack—possibly explaining why five “viable” IEDs failed to detonate
What was in Uweinat’s phone between November 2022 and December 2025?
Without a control order, no one monitored his communications. No one knows who he contacted. No one knows if he passed along Philippine contacts from El Matari’s network. No one knows if he made introductions for Akram.
What Was Allowed to Happen
The circumstantial evidence raises a question the Royal Commission must answer: did El Matari, Haddad, and Uweinat do more than radicalise Naveed Akram?
Did they facilitate the attack itself—the doctrine, the contacts, the Philippine connection?
If not them, then who? The Akrams didn’t materialise in Mindanao by accident.
Australia’s counter-terrorism apparatus—pivoted toward espionage, reliant on worthless tools, possessed of powers it wouldn’t use—watched the threat it had declared “dissipated” operate in plain sight.
The network that made Bondi possible is still intact. The men who may have facilitated it remain unpunished.
Three questions no one in power has answered:
What was in Uweinat’s phone between November 2022 and December 2025?
Who introduced the Akrams to “religious leaders” in Mindanao—and told them to change their flight dates two weeks before Laguindab was killed?
How did a father and son from Sydney learn to build five IEDs and why didn’t they go off?
Someone knows. El Matari in his Supermax cell—still writing letters. Haddad in his warehouse—never charged despite years of scrutiny. Uweinat walking free in Sydney—never monitored, never questioned.
They’re not talking.
A Royal Commission convenes in April.