Caravan loaded with explosive part of a ‘false terror plot’

A caravan found full of explosives outside Sydney earlier this year was part of a “terrorism plot manufactured” invented by criminals, said Australian police.

The caravan, which was found in the northwest of Sydney on January 19, contained enough explosives to produce an explosion of 40 m wide, along with a note that shows antisemy messages and a list of Jewish synagogues.

Its discovery, after a series of antiseemitic attacks in Australia, caused generalized panic.

But on Monday, the Federal Police of Australia (AFP) revealed that they knew “almost immediately” that the caravan was “essentially a criminal work.”

The attached commissioner of National Security of the AFP, Krissy Barrett, said that the researchers within the team against New South Wales terrorism believed that the caravan was “part of a plot of manufactured terrorism.”

The authorities reached that belief based on the information they already had, the ease with which they found the caravan and visibility of the explosives contained inside, as well as the fact that there was no detonator.

However, the police refrained from telling the public that he believed that the plot was false “by great caution”, since they continued to receive notices on other related terrorist plots. Now they trust that these notices were also manufactured, said Barrett.

The false caravan plot involved several people with different levels of participation, according to the police. Among them, they had planned to buy a caravan, load it with explosives and anti -Semitic materials and leave it in a specific location, before informing the police about “an imminent terrorist attack against Jewish Australians.”

Mrs. Barrett described it as “an artificial elaborate scheme by organized criminals, at the national level and from the coast”, added that the leader of the plot maintained a distance and hired alleged local criminals to carry out parts of the operation.

Police confirmed that the individual has not been arrested.

“Too many criminals are accused of paying others to lead to anti -Semitic or terrorism incidents to get our attention or divert our resources,” said Barrett. He also pointed out that the police believe that “the person who pulls the strings wanted changes in his criminal state.”

Mrs. Barrett cited the case of another person who allegedly tried to acquire high -power weapons for a false terror plot to be able to provide information to the authorities in exchange for a reduction to their sentence.

BBC News has contacted AFP for more details about the alleged agenda of people behind the caravan deception, but did not receive more comments.

“Regardless of the motivation of those responsible for this false plot, this has had a chilling effect on the Jewish community,” Barrett said in his statement.

“What organized crime has done to the Jewish community is representable, and it will not happen without consequences. There were also unjustified suspicions aimed at other communities, and that is also rebuked.”

Separately, the New Wales Police of the South arrested 14 people on Monday morning as part of Strike Force Pearl: a police operation established in December 2024 to investigate antisemy hate crimes in Sydney.

The establishment of the strike force followed a series of anti -Semitic attacks in Australia at the end of 2014, including the vandalism of a Jewish school in the Eastern Sydney suburbs and the fire of a child care center, which was put up and sprinkled with antisemy messages.