Sydney: A 17-hour-long hostage drama in which a heavily-armed man of Iranian-origin held some 15 people hostage at a cafe here ended late on Tuesday night with the police storming it, reportedly resulting in two deaths but two Indians were among the hostages who escaped safely.
Police fired stun grenades and shots as they stormed the Lindt Chocolate Cafe in Sydney’s commercial district after 2:30 AM local time Tuesday (9 PM IST Monday) and later declared that the siege was over.
However, they gave no details about the fate of the gunman, identified as 50-year-old Haron Monis, or of the hostages many of whom had escaped earlier on their own.
Australian TV networks reported that two persons — gunman Monis and one of the captives — died and three others were severely injured in the police operation. Police, however, did not confirm this.
Two Indian nationals — Vishwakant Ankit Reddy and Pushpendu Ghosh — were among the hostages involved when Monis began his siege. However, Reddy, an Infosys employee in his mid-30s, and Ghosh, whose details were not known, escaped safely.
Reddy has been working in Australia for the past seven years and is a native of Guntur in Andhra Pradesh.
Both are undergoing medical check-ups, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said in New Delhi.
The gunman, a self-styled Muslim cleric, was described by his former lawyer as an isolated figure, who was acting alone.
Monis, who arrived in Australia as a refugee in 1996, notoriously sent letters to the families of Australian soldiers who lost their lives in Afghanistan, accusing them of being murderers.
In November last year, he was charged with being an accessory before and after the murder of his ex-wife, who was allegedly stabbed and set alight in her apartment complex. In March, he was charged with sexually and indecently assaulting a young woman in 2002. .
