(Sydney Morning Herald) The boy arrested in a Bankstown backstreet with hunting knives and a desire to kill had once been “your average Muslim 16-year-old boy,” according to the teenager’s father.
“He slit his eyebrows thinking it was ‘cool’; he wore ordinary clothes; he started chatting with girls; he started playing sport; would stay up all night playing PlayStation,” the man said in an affidavit, sworn before his son was found guilty of planning a terrorist attack on the streets of Sydney’s south-west.
As a 12-year-old he had held a sign at a protest calling for the beheading of people who “insult the prophet” and at 14 he refused to stand for the national anthem during school assembly, telling his principal he only stood for Allah.
