An Australian teenager who appears to have killed himself in a suicide car bombing in Iraq stored explosives at his family home and planned to attack cafés and shopping centres in Melbourne.
Images on the internet on Wednesday showed Jake Bilardi, 18, at the wheel of a battered four-wheel drive moments before it exploded in Ramadi.
The extent of the teenager’s plans to attack Australia were contained in a 4,400-word online manifesto that he apparently wrote in January after volunteering for a suicide mission.
Julie Bishop, Australia’s foreign minister, said security agencies knew that Bilardi had travelled to the Middle East last August. She cancelled his passport in October on security advice.
Written under his adopted name, Abu Abdullah al-Australi, and entitled From Melbourne to Ramadi: My Journey, the manifesto is an account of his upbringing as the youngest of six in a studious Melbourne family. He aspired to be a political journalist, described himself as an atheist and charted his increasing conviction that America and its allies, including Australia, had engaged in decades of unjust wars, culminating in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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The manifesto also traced his embrace of Islam — aided by a policy in Melbourne that put laptop computers in the hands of school students — and his decision to mount attacks on his home city if his plans to reach the Middle East were thwarted.
Towards the end of his manifesto, he wrote: “I was growing tired of the corruption and filthiness of Australian society and yearned to live under the Islamic State with the Muslims. I now had the determination to finally remove myself from this land.
“I continued my search for a contact, even at one point considering simply crossing the border alone without any assistance.
“Finally, I made contact with a brother online who promised to bring me across the border, it was a risky decision to trust someone online but I was desperate to leave and was confident the brother was genuine.”
Australia’s security agencies are likely to be troubled that, frustrated at a failed first attempt to reach Syria or Iraq, Bilardi planned to attack Melbourne using explosives and knives and saw himself committing suicide.
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The manifesto did not mention the death of his mother, which occurred when he was 12. Former school friends said that this had had a profound effect on Bilardi.
Jamie Kassan, who attended Craigieburn Secondary College with Bilardi, said he believed that it had turned him towards Islam, but not extremism. “He began looking into Islam after the passing of his mother but I don’t believe that drove him to do it,” said Mr Kassan.
Another student, Harley, 15, said that he used to talk to Bilardi on the bus to school. “He was really quiet after his mum died,” he said. “He used to tell me ‘I wish I can just live a normal life, just start a new life’.”