The most notorious Australian fighting with Islamic State has been killed in a US airstrike in Iraq, the Australian government has been told.
Neil Prakash, who was at the centre of an Isis network that conceived terrorism plots in Sydney and Melbourne, was directly targeted by a US warplane on Friday.
His death follows the killing in Syria last week of a Sydney woman, Shadi Jabar Khalil Mohammad, who was the older sister of Farhad Jabar, the 15-year-old who mounted an armed attack on a Sydney police station last year, shooting dead a police accountant.
She was with her Sudanese husband who was also killed. Both were regarded as active recruiters for Islamic State.
Prakash, 24, originally from Melbourne, was killed along with up to ten other Islamic State jihadists when the building they were in was struck in Mosul, the group’s de facto capital in Iraq. He was a key target, George Brandis, the Australian attorney-general, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
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Prakash was considered a high-value target, the newspaper reported, because of his prominence as a recruiter, not just for his native Australia but in other countries as well. He had appeared in an Isis video and was linked to multiple extremist plots in Australia, and also to calls for lone wolf attacks in the United States.
He was regarded as an enemy combatant under international law and is understood to have been on a “kill list”, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Dr Greg Barton, a terrorism expert at Deakin University, said Prakash was the last known high-profile link between the Syria-Iraq battlefield and the extremist networks in Melbourne and Sydney.
He is believed to have been involved in influencing the alleged Mother’s Day pipe bomb plot in Melbourne last year, last year’s alleged Anzac Day plot to target police in Melbourne and the recent alleged Anzac Day plot in Sydney. He also helped radicalise Numan Haider, who was shot dead in Melbourne after attacking two policemen with a knife.
“His death is very welcome in that he’s the last prominent Australian that we’re aware of who served as a key link with friends back in Australia,” Dr Barton said.
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“It doesn’t mean the end of these exchanges but it certainly marks the closing of the first chapter,” he said.