SYDNEY: Australian police said Tuesday they have charged 14 members of an organized crime ring accused of menacing the country with attacks dressed up as religiously motivated hate crimes.
Jewish neighborhoods in Sydney city have in recent months seen synagogues daubed in anti-Semitic graffiti, buildings firebombed in the dead of night and cars torched by vandals.
Although the crime wave stoked fears about rising anti-Semitism in Australia, police said they no longer believed many of these incidents were driven by “ideology.”
Instead, police said it appeared to be an attempt by organized criminals to gain favor by carrying out high-profile attacks — and then tipping off authorities later.
New South Wales Police said Tuesday that 14 people had been arrested and charged with 65 offenses, including taking part in a “criminal group,” arson and destroying property.
“None of the individuals we have arrested... have displayed any form of anti-Semitic ideology,” NSW Police deputy commissioner David Hudson said Monday evening after a series of raids.
“I think these organized crime figures have taken an opportunity to play off the vulnerability of the Jewish community,” he added.
The most alarming incident was the discovery of explosives in an abandoned caravan alongside a purported list of Jewish targets.
At the time, NSW Premier Chris Minns said the caravan appeared to be part of a foiled “mass casualty” terror plot.
Police now believe it was nothing more than a carefully constructed “criminal con job.”
“I can reveal that the caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event, but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit,” senior officer Krissy Barrett said on Monday evening.
Police said they suspected the same “individual or individuals” were behind both the anti-Semitic attacks and the caravan hoax.
“It was about causing chaos within the community, causing threat, causing angst, diverting police resources away from their day jobs to have them focus on matters that would allow them to get up to, engage in other criminal activity,” said deputy commissioner Hudson.
“There are a variety of reasons why individuals do this.”

NEW YORK: A US judge on Monday ordered that Palestinian Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil not be deported for now as part of US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on some anti-Israel protesters, and set a court hearing in the case for Wednesday. Trump publicly denounced Khalil and said more arrests would follow. Khalil has been moved to a federal jail for migrants in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings, according to his lawyers and a US detainee database.
Demonstrators on the streets of New York City, the state attorney general and the American Civil Liberties Union have denounced his arrest by US Department of Homeland Security agents as an attack on free speech.
Police and hundreds of protesters briefly clashed in lower Manhattan and at least one person was detained, according to a Reuters witness. Khalil, who had held legal permanent resident status and was arrested Saturday, has been a prominent figure in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian student protest movement that set off campus demonstrations across the United States and around the world last year. Trump branded Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” on social media. On Monday, US District Court Judge Jesse Furman put a hold on his deportation “unless and until the Court orders otherwise.” Khalil’s lawyers also urged Furman to order Khalil’s return to New York. They accused the government of seeking to deprive Khalil of access to legal counsel by sending him far from New York.
Trump said on social media that Khalil’s “is the first arrest of many to come.”
The Trump administration has not said Khalil is accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump wrote that his presence in the US was “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”
The Education Department on Monday sent letters to 60 US universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and four University of California schools, warning them of cuts in federal funding unless they addressed allegations of antisemitism on campus. Even before Khalil’s arrest, students say federal immigration agents have been spotted at student housing around Columbia’s Manhattan campus since Thursday, a day before the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts awarded to the school because of what it described as antisemitic harassment on and near Columbia’s New York City campus.
The federal agents have been trying to detain at least one other international student, according to the Student Workers of Columbia labor union. Spokespeople for DHS and ICE declined to answer questions about the union’s account, which Reuters was unable to independently verify.
A spokesperson for the Department of State said visa records are confidential under US law and so the department could not comment.

’CHILLING EFFECT’
On Saturday evening, agents from the Department of Homeland Security arrested Khalil in front of his wife, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, telling him his student visa had been revoked, according to Amy Greer, a lawyer for Khalil.
His wife showed the agents Khalil’s green card and they also threatened to arrest her if she did not leave her lobby, Greer said. They then said the green card was also revoked and handcuffed Khalil, Greer said.
Hours before his arrest, Khalil told Reuters he was concerned that the government was targeting him.
Khalil and other activists note that Jewish students are among the protest organizers, and say their criticism of Israel and its US government support is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism. Jewish faculty at Columbia held a rally and press conference in support of Khalil outside a university building on Monday, holding signs saying “Jews say no to deportations.” “There is a chill in the air. It’s a chill of fear and despair,” said Marianne Hirsch, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who grew up in Romania as a child of Holocaust survivors. While the Trump administration has cited concerns over antisemitism, the president and his allies have themselves been accused of enabling antisemitism. Following a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where some demonstrators carried torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Trump said there were “fine people on both sides.” Trump, who denies allegations of being antisemitic, also faced criticism in 2022 for dining with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.