Overview
On the morning of 15 December 2014, Man Haron Monis walked into the Lindt Chocolat Café in Martin Place, central Sydney, with a shotgun in a blue plastic bag. He took eighteen people hostage and made them hold a black flag bearing the shahada against the window, where every television camera in the country could see it. The siege lasted sixteen hours. It ended at 02:14 the following morning when Monis shot the café manager, Tori Johnson, and police stormed the building.
Three people died: Johnson, the barrister Katrina Dawson, and Monis.
What the Inquest Found
The New South Wales coroner, Michael Barnes, delivered findings on 24 May 2017 after one of the longest inquests in the state's history.
Katrina Dawson was killed by fragments of police bullets that ricocheted from hard surfaces as officers entered. That is the coroner's finding, stated plainly.
Police commanders, he found, had underestimated the threat Monis posed and had acted on flawed advice, including a psychiatric assessment that shaped the decision to wait. The ten minutes that passed between Monis firing his first shot and the tactical entry was, in the coroner's words, too long. Eight telephone calls made by hostages during the siege went unanswered, which he described as a significant failure. He made forty-five recommendations, including that the force establish a specialist cadre of terrorism negotiators.
He also found that responsibility for the deaths rested with Monis, who had initiated an extremely dangerous situation.
The Theory
The false flag reading appeared within days of the siege, well before any of the above was public. It rested on a set of genuine oddities. Monis was on bail on charges of accessory to the murder of his ex-wife and faced more than forty sexual assault charges; he had written to Australian soldiers' families and been prosecuted for it; he had been known to ASIO and had been assessed and set aside. The flag he made hostages display was not an Islamic State flag, though it was widely reported as one at the time. Footage showed some hostages escaping in a manner critics read as staged.
From these the claim was built that Monis was a state asset or a patsy, that the siege was permitted or arranged to justify counter-terrorism legislation then before parliament, and that the deaths were not what the authorities said they were.
Where the Claim Met the Record
The unusual feature of this case is that the inquest confirmed the specific factual points the theory had used, and drew the opposite conclusion from them.
A hostage was in fact killed by police fire — not by the gunman, and not as first reported. Police had in fact been told things about Monis that were wrong, and had in fact waited too long. Monis had in fact been known to the security service and had in fact been released on bail by a system that could have held him. Each of those is now an official finding rather than an allegation.
What the coroner did not find was direction. The failures he documented are of a recognisable kind: an assessment given too much weight, a command structure waiting for a trigger it had defined too narrowly, a phone line nobody was watching. He set them out in detail and attributed the deaths to the man who took the hostages.
What It Established
The siege is a useful case precisely because the official process was unusually unsparing. An inquest that was willing to say a police bullet killed a hostage and that commanders should have moved sooner is not obviously the output of a cover-up, and the theory has had to argue against the document that supplies most of its facts.