Man claiming to have bomb holds daughter hostage in Australian court
Australian police cordoned off a building today in a tense stand-off with a man claiming to have a bomb in his backpack and issuing demands from a lawyer’s office where he holed up with his teenage daughter, police said.
Police maintained a cordon around the lawyers’ office building in the western Sydney area of Parramatta, and workers in nearby office blocks said they had been evacuated.
The man, who appeared to be in his 50s, made a series of demands to police negotiators who were inside the office building, which adjoins a court complex, Police Assistant Commissioner Denis Clifford said.
Mr Clifford declined to detail those demands and said police had yet to establish a motive.
“We’re working through those demands with him and we’re doing the best we can to secure a peaceful resolution,” Mr Clifford told reporters. “The fact that he’s there and he’s made certain threats is obviously of concern to us.”
Mr Clifford said the girl, who was apparently aged in her early teens, appeared to be doing well.
“We don’t believe there’s any specific threat against the girl, but obviously we’d like to secure her release,” he said.
“The concern is that she’s in a situation where we’ve got somebody with a backpack – we don’t know exactly what’s in that backpack so we have to assume that what he’s saying is true.”
Police officers were seen entering the building with at least one automatic weapon.
Betty Hor said she was working at the reception desk at the lawyers’ offices when the man approached this morning and asked to see someone whom Ms Hor had never heard of.
The man went upstairs briefly then returned to the reception desk and repeated his request. She repeated that she had never heard of the man he was looking for.
Ms Hor said he then threw a book on the desk and told her to call the unknown man and the state attorney-general’s department and “tell them I’ve got a bomb in my backpack”.
Ms Hor called police as the man walked upstairs to a lawyer’s office with the girl, who called him “Dad”.
Ms Hor said he seemed frustrated and angry. She said she had never seen him before.
Television footage showed the man looking from a second-floor window shirtless and wearing the same kind of wig as worn in Australian courts by judges and lawyers. At one point he spat on the wig.
He later swung a glass bottle like a hammer to smash a plate-sized hole in the office window. He yelled through the hole and threw the bottle, then a telephone handset, which was left dangling by its cord.
Five ambulances and two fire engines were standing by at the scene.
Robert Hoffman, who works in a neighbouring office block, said police had evacuated his and other buildings in the vicinity.
Police moved people at least 100 yards from the building where the man was holed up, Mr Hoffman said.
Mr Clifford said he did not believe that the stand-off had anything to do with the family court that adjoins the building.
Bitter family court cases have triggered some high-profile crimes recently in Australia, including the murder of a four-year-old girl whose father threw her more than 260 feet from a bridge in the southern city of Melbourne in 2009.
The father, Arthur Freeman, 37, was sentenced in April to life in prison after a jury rejected his plea of innocence due to mental illness.
Today’s stand-off comes a month after an extortionist broke into a Sydney home and fastened a fake bomb around the neck of a millionaire’s teenage daughter. She spent 10 terrifying hours with the device strapped to her before police determined it was harmless and freed her.
A man has been arrested in the United States in connection with the incident and is awaiting extradition.
