Speaking at press conference Tuesday morning local time, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said the Australian intelligence service ASIO had determined Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard was responsible got at least two terrorist attacks on Australian Jews.
ASIO director Mike Burgess told the press conference Revolutionary Guard agents used cut-outs and proxies to effect the attacks on the Addas Israel Synagogue in Melbourne and the Louis Continental Kitchen and Curly Lewis Brewery at Bndin Beach in Sydney. Addas was firebombed in December, 2024, and the Jewish restaurant were subject to arson attack in October, 2024.
Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong said Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador and three Iranian embassy officials un response, eddectively shuttering the Iranian embassy in Australia opened in 1968. The PM said Australian embassy staff in Tehran had been removed to a safe third country. Albanese and Wong said they would maintain skeleton diplomatic relations with Iran through a third party, likely the Swiss embassy.
ASIO chief Burgess said they suspected Iran was behind more anti-Semitic terorist attacks in Australia, but wasn’t behind all of them. He said Australia has a home-grown and growing anti-Semitism problem which Iran sought to exacerbate. Burgess also said the Iranian embassy wasn’t known to be involved in the attacks on Australian Jews.
Neither Albansese, Wong, Burgess nor Australian home secretary Tony Burke also speaking at the press conference offered any evidence for Iranian involvement in the terror attacks. Several cited “on-going police investigations” and “national security as reasons for the secrecy.
Iran was also implicated in the 1994 bombing of the bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center ANUAm the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, or Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, which caused the death of 84 people. No people were killed in the several firebombings of synagogues, Jewish restaurants, residences and automobiles owned by Jews in Australia. Iran was also implicated in the October, 1985, hijacjing of the Italian cruise liner MS Achiiles Lauro and the murder of an elderly Jewish American man in a wheelchair, along with know attacks on Jews and Israel from Iranian proxies over the decades including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi rebels in Orth Yemen and others.