There’s a lot of news we don’t get in New Zealand with our left wing media! How frequently do Australian based Islamists travel and teach in New Zealand? Constantly!
Apprentice electrician turned jihadist Bourhan Hraichie (above), 22, launched a brutal attack on his cellmate, a former Australian Army reservist, three years ago
- Prison staff dubbed Bourhan Hraichie ‘The Carver’ after shocking crimes
- 18-year-old slashed Islamic State slogan into head of Army reservist cellmate
- Hraichie also threatened to behead the boss of the NSW prisons authority
- He has now been sentenced to 34 years in jail with 29 years non-parole
A jihadi who tried to organise a terror attack and sliced an ISIS slogan into his cellmate’s head and has been jailed for 29 years without parole.
Bourhan Hraichie, 22, pleaded guilty in the NSW Supreme Court to four offences over his long-running plan to shoot officers at Bankstown police station and for causing grievous bodily harm to Michael O’Keefe with intent to murder.
He also threatened to kill NSW prisons boss Peter Severin in a letter in which he boasted about turning O’Keefe into an ‘IS sketchpad’.
NSW Supreme Court Justice Peter Johnson on Friday sentenced Hraichie to a total of 34 years in jail, with a non-parole period of 29 years, for the ‘disturbing mix’ of violent crimes.
Hraichie cheered as his sentence was handed down.
The jihadi, who has already spent much of his adolescent and adult life in detention, made plans to shoot police at Bankstown police station in Sydney in late 2015.
But after breaching his parole for unrelated offences and becoming unable to convince others to carry out his plans, Hraichie turned to terror behind bars.
In April 2016, hours after meeting new cellmate O’Keefe, Hraichie bashed the ex-solider, tied him up with bedsheets and waterboarded him with a blanket and hot water.
O’Keefe had a short moment of respite to cough up water and fall to his knees before Hraichie grabbed a razor and carved ‘E 4 E’ – meaning ‘eye for an eye’ – into the victim’s forehead.
Hraichie later told counter-terrorism police he regretted not using a bigger knife.
As well as writing a letter to the prisons boss in 2016 threatening to ‘turn your jails in slaughterhouses’, Hraichie penned an unsolicited letter to Justice Johnson this year to make clear his beliefs.
The ‘e4e’ carving on Michael O’Keefe’s head stands for the Islamic State slogan ‘an eye for an eye’. On right, O’Keefe shows off the cuts on his chest and neck
‘I will always support jihad … and I love my brothers in al-Qaeda,’ Hraichie said.
‘You are a representative of democracy, a false deity and I would never stand for (one)’.
The letter spelled out Hraichie’s support for the terror shooting of NSW police accountant Curtis Cheng and stated his only regret for the O’Keefe attack was that waterboarding and mutilation were not strictly authorised in his extreme view of Islam.
Hrachie was ‘firmly committed to violent jihad’ and rejected the laws of Australia while maintaining a fixated view ‘adverse to democracy and free society’, Justice Johnson said.
‘If anything, his attitude has hardened (since 2016),’ Justice Johnson said.
The combined sentence of 34 years included terms of 20 years for the O’Keefe attack, 20 years for the police shooting preparations and six years, three months for the letter to the prisons boss.
Hraichie will be aged 50 when first eligible for parole in 2047.
Bourhan attacked Australian Army reservist Michael O’Keefe at a jail in Kempsey, engraving a series of Islamic State slogans into his head.
The 18-year-old screamed in Arabic to his fellow prisoners as he whipped O’Keefe with an electrical cord and carved him with a razor blade, leaving him for dead.
The shocking attempted murder landed him in Australia’s highest security prison, Goulburn’s SuperMax. Bourhan then threatened to behead the boss of the state prison authority.
Before he was sentenced, Hraichie’s father told Daily Mail Australia Bourhan wasn’t a terrorist but a kid from a ‘good family’ who had been afforded every opportunity.
Mr Hraichie said his son once dreamed of being an electrician, worked at Hungry Jacks and was a ‘cute little boy who made everyone laugh’.
That all changed when the family moved to Greenacre, in Sydney’s southwest, and Bourhan desperately wanted to impress the Year 12 boys at school.
‘He got onto drugs, he started to steal, his addictions grew and look what happened,’ Mr Hraichie said.
A fourth generation Lebanese-Australian, whose great-grandfather migrated to the country in the 1940s, Bourhan was in and out of trouble with police throughout his early teenage years.
Mr Hraichie called in the cops on his own son after he stole money from his wallet and robbed family properties.
‘He’s very easily influenced,’ said Mr Hraichie, a former Army reservist and NSW Police Ethnic Liaison officer.
Bourhan’s troubles peaked when he became addicted to the drug ice, took his mother’s car for a joy ride and ‘wrote it off’.
He had only four weeks left on parole when he was charged with breaking into a home – landing back in the prison where he attempted to murder O’Keefe.
‘He wanted to belong to something – and there must be something in jails where obviously you’ve got to belong to some group or faction to fit in,’ Mr Hraichie said.
‘He’s the kind of person who would take things to the next step – because he’s fearless.’
It’s little wonder that this is Brentan Tarrant country!!