Man Haron Monis claimed to be an Iranian spy and a convert to a persecuted sect of Islam to obtain asylum in Australia, claims that were “almost certainly a fiction”, an inquest has heard.



The Sydney siege gunman, who had been assessed as suffering from schizophrenia, also wrote to the Australian attorney general in the months before the siege asking if he could legally pledge his support for Isis, it was revealed.

A Sydney coroner’s court was told on Monday that Monis had led an inscrutable and “isolated existence” during his two decades in Australia, using more than 20 names, regularly tangling with authorities and growing increasingly unstable before he took a shotgun into the Lindt cafe in Martin Place on 15 December last year.

The inquest will examine the circumstances around the 17-hour siege that followed, its initial two-week phase focusing on Monis, “a complex and secretive man about his own life, even though he could be very public about his views”, the counsel assisting the coroner, Jeremy Gormly SC, said.

Born Mohammad Hassan Manteghi in 1964, in the western Iranian city of Bourajerd, Monis was married by 21 and attained the religious rank of “hujjat al-Islam”.



In interviews with immigration department officials, he claimed to have fallen foul of authorities in Iran after publishing a book of subversive poetry. “Later reviews of his poetry have assessed it as ranging from mixed quality to bad,” Gormly said.

Monis also said he was a convert to the Ahmadi version of Islam, which is considered heretical by the Iranian regime, and was interrogated by Vavak, Iran’s secret police. “He admitted to Vavak some academic work for the Ahmadi but denied any conversion to the Ahmadi faith,” Gormly said.

He allegedly became a spy for the police but told Australian authorities he remained a “secret follower” of the faith. “This was almost certainly a fiction he told to obtain refugee status,” Gormly said.

Complicating the picture were unverified reports from Iran suggesting Monis had been implicated in a fraud plot, that he had been accused of “sexual misconduct” and that his social standing had begun to falter. “It’s difficult to reach any sound conclusion as to what caused Mr Monis to leave Iran,” Gormly said.

The inquest heard Monis had adopted an “array of names” after arriving in Australia in 1996 but this had not hindered investigators. “Mr Monis had a curious feature of administrative compliance,” Gormly said, saying he had filed tax returns, reported his changes of name and address, and frequently wrote to government officials. “The contrast between compliance and illegality is a thread that runs through most of his time in Australia,” he said.

In early 2001 Monis began to chain himself to the gates of state parliaments in Western Australia and New South Wales. He also began writing letters, including to the then UN secretary general Kofi Annan, the BBC, the New York Times, and the then US president Bill Clinton.

One court-appointed psychologist speculated the self-styled ayatollah was no mere rabble rouser “but really a disturbed individual with delusional thoughts and narcissistic tendencies”.



His various interviews and assessments with court officers showed he could be “plausible, courteous and controlled”, junior counsel assisting Sophie Callan said, “but almost entirely consumed in his own self-importance”.

In Sydney he established himself as a clairvoyant, placing advertisements in papers aimed at “poorly educated impressionable people, mainly women”, Callan said. Financial records suggested that Monis had more than 500 clients over the eight-year term of the business, grossing in some years as much as $125,000, the inquest heard.

The business, which was conducted under the alias Michael Heyson Mavros, “provided Mr Monis with predatory opportunity for sexual assault”. In 2014 he was charged with more than 200 sexual offences conducted during the course of his work.

Callan told the inquest Monis would ask customers to strip down and begin to paint their bodies with water, assuring reluctant women “that sexual energy was needed to overcome the curse of evil or black magic”.

“The likelihood that these offences would have been proved seems objectively high,” she said.

The coroner heard that in the six years leading to the 2014 siege, Monis became increasingly erratic, styling himself a devout Muslim, adopting the title Sheikh Haron, and writing his infamous letters the families of fallen Australian soldiers.

Mental health issues that first surfaced in 2005 had become more acute by 2010, when Monis collapsed in the street twice following what paramedics describes as bizarre and “psychotic episodes”.

A psychiatrist that same year diagnosed him as “suffering from a form of schizophrenia though with a high level of function”.

Incongruously, in 2013 Monis briefly joined the Mount Druitt branch of the Rebels motorcycle gang. Club members found him “strange and weird”, Callan said.

But “his willingness to change his appearance, adopt the garb of a new persona, and his attraction to a group that he saw as exercising power and influence” were telling, she said.

“Mr Monis’ constant goal in life appears to have been achieving significance.”

By 2014, Monis was “a man spiralling downwards”, Gormly said.

He had been charged with an additional 40 sex offences, and wrote to the Australian attorney general, George Brandis, inquiring if it would be legal to make “a pledge of allegiance to the caliph”, in reference to the leader of Isis, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“He had no money, no property. He was in debt. He had developed no employment skills. His attempt to develop a personal religious following … had failed. Indeed the Islamic community in Australia did not accept him,” Gormly said.

“He had few friends and no standing with any group or institution. His attempts to join other groups, even the bikies who tolerated him for a short period, failed.

“The likelihood of a lengthy jail sentence was high. His grandiose self-assessments of the past were simply not coming to fruition,” he said.

The inquest continues.

