A “radicalized” and mentally ill 16-year-old was shot dead by police Saturday night in the suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, after injuring a person in a knife attack, Australian authorities said.
The teenager, armed with a knife, “lunged” towards police and was shot dead by an officer, Western Australia state premier Roger Cook said at a news conference.
“There are indications that he became radicalized online. But I want to assure people that at this point it appears that he acted alone,” Cook said.
Police received a call Saturday night from a man warning that he was going to commit “acts of violence,” but without giving his name or location, state police official Col Blanch told reporters.
Minutes later, he added, police received an emergency call warning them that “a man with a knife was running” in a car park in Willetton, a suburb south of Perth.
The individual was armed with a 12-inch-long kitchen knife, and based on police body camera footage, the teen refused to put it down as police had ordered, Blanch said.
The agents fired two electric pulse guns but “none of them had the desired effect,” he said.
“The man continued to advance toward (an officer) with a gun, who fired a single shot and fatally wounded” the individual, the police officer said. The teenager died in the hospital that same night.
The “mature” man injured by a single stab wound during the attack is in “serious” but stable condition, the police official said.
Police believe the teen sent messages to members of the Muslim community, who immediately notified police, they said without revealing information about their content.
The teenager had “mental health problems but also online radicalization problems,” according to the same source.
In recent years, the attacker was followed as part of a program to combat violence and extremism.
“This is not a crime-based approach, it is a program aimed at helping people who express ideologies that concern our community,” Mr. Blanch explained.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese explained that the police and intelligence services had kept him informed of the events, according to which there was no “ongoing threat.”
“We are a nation committed to peace and there is no place for violent extremism in Australia,” Albanese wrote on social media.
Violent crime is rare in Australia, but this incident comes less than a month after another stabbing that left six dead in a Sydney shopping center (southeast).
The perpetrator of this attack, Joel Cauchi, a 40-year-old man who suffered from mental illness, was shot dead by police. His parents said his son was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 17, then he left his home in Queensland (northeast) and abandoned treatment.
Two days after this shopping center attack, a bishop of an Assyrian church was also stabbed during a live-streamed sermon at a Sydney church. The victim survived his injuries. A 16-year-old boy has since been charged with a “terrorist act.”
