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Bloomberg
IS claimed responsibility for a hostage-taking in the Australian city of Melbourne that left a gunman and another person dead and three police officers injured.
Following a standoff at an apartment building, officers shot dead 29-year-old Yacqub Khayre on Monday evening after he came out and fired a sawn-off shotgun at police. He captured a woman he’d arranged to meet from an escort agency and is believed by police to have killed the building receptionist.
Officers are investigating whether Khayre shot the man and tied up the woman, a 36-year-old Colombian national, in order to lure police into a shootout. One officer was shot in the face, though the injuries aren’t life-threatening, Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton told reporters on Tuesday.
“A soldier of IS carried out the attack in Melbourne, Australia in response to the calls for targeting the citizens of the coalition states,†the group’s Amaq news agency said in a statement. The group has claimed responsibility for a wave of deadly incidents in the U.K., including the weekend attack in London that left seven people dead and almost
50 injured.
Khayre had been known to security forces for almost a decade and had been cleared of involvement in a plot to attack an army barracks in Sydney in 2009. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described yesterday’s incident in the southeastern suburb of Brighton as a “terrorist attack†that underlined the need for constant vigilance in the face of extremism.