Neil Prakash, Australia’s most senior operative with Islamic State, has died, according to reports circulated within the ranks of the terrorist organisation.

The killing of the Melbourne man, who was among a select group of online recruiters of foreign jihadists in Syria and Iraq, has been described in closed communication channels used by Isis, News Corp reported.

No details have yet emerged of Prakash’s reported demise and the Australian government is unable to confirm it.

But News Corp quoted a fellow Isis recruiter as saying his death was “posted on Telegram”, an encrypted messaging service known to have been used by the group since last year, as well as another online messaging channel.

“I did not know him but I heard,” the Isis member said.

Prakash, who travelled to Syria in 2013 and adopted the nom de guerre Abu Khaled al-Cambodi as a nod to his Cambodian background, has been wanted for arrest since last August under a warrant issued by the Australian federal police.

He was linked to an alleged plot to behead a Victorian police officer on Anzac Day months earlier.

Listed in an Isis guidebook as an online point of contact for aspiring jihadists, Prakash was active on mainstream social media sites until falling silent late last year.

The office of the attorney general, George Brandis, said the government “cannot confirm reports of the death of Neil Prakash at this time because of the serious security situation in Syria and Iraq”.

Doubts have previously emerged after at least one reported killing of an Australian Isis fighter.

Khaled Sharrouf, first thought to have been killed in a drone attack with friend Mohamed Elomar in Syria in June, was soon after considered likely still alive.



News Corp reported last October claims by a US jihadi that Prakash had been banned from online activity by Isis commanders after the killing of three friends in US-led airstrikes.



One of Prakash’s final tweets called on the US to make him a martyr through a “paradise missile”.

The month his Australian arrest warrant was issued, Prakash shared via Twitter a list of details about apparent western assassination targets including eight Australians – one a Victorian MP – with the message: “Cyber war got em shook!”

Last June, Prakash was listed by the Australian government for targeted financial sanctions, which brought the risk of up to 10 years’ jail to anyone who gave Prakash “material support”.

The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, told parliament that Prakash had “sought to commission violent terrorist acts, including in Australia, and to recruit others, including young Australian women and girls, to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the Daesh terrorists”.

Other Australians reportedly killed fighting with Isis include Sydney teenager Abdullah Elmir last year and Zakaryah Raad in 2014.



News of Prakash’s rumoured death broke the same day a report emerged of a Sydney man who had returned from the Syrian conflict warning that Australia faced more jihadi-inspired violence like the murder of police accountant Curtis Cheng.

On Saturday, a prominent British Muslim activist told a Sydney University audience that countries like Australia needed to recognise that Islam was “native” to the west to address jihadi-inspired violence.



Maajid Nawaz, a former member of group Hizb ut-Tahrir turned founder of the counter-extremism thinktank Quilliam, said western communities needed to “own” the problem of radical Islam.

“When we finally realise that Muslims are here to stay, that they are native to the west, their version of Islam is native to the west, we will own that conversation on equal terms,” he said.

“As we love our fellow Christian neighbours, we will love our fellow Muslim neighbours because we will feel it’s part of us.”

Nawaz said Muslims born and raised in Australia were following a strand of the religion also born and raised in Australia.

“When we look at it like that, we stop ‘other-ising’ and we will feel like we own the problem and therefore own the conversation, as we do with Christianity,” he said.

Nawaz – who has courted controversy in some sectors of the Muslim community through calls for more secularism and internal efforts to deal with extremists – was thanked by a Sydney Muslim woman in the audience for “open[ing] up the dialogue”.

The woman, identified only as Rizvana, told Nawaz she hoped that “people who are supposed to represent mainstream Islam will take a cue from you”.