Voices from Allah

They were allegedly primed for mayhem:

The two 16-year-old school friends, who cannot be named due to their age, were arrested in October outside a laneway prayer hall and charged with preparing for a terrorist act and membership of a terrorist organisation.

They allegedly had a backpack containing a torch, a knife sharpener, two camouflage-print neck gaiters, a handwritten Arabic note pledging allegiance to the caliphate and two hunting knives bought earlier that day from the Bankstown Gun Shop.

The second boy, the stepson of a convicted extremist and a counter-terrorism target since the age of 12, had a video on his phone in which he held down a sheep as its neck was slashed with a knife, Parramatta Children’s Court heard this week.

Practice makes perfect.

During an unsuccessful bail application this week, it was revealed that the first boy was detained in Egypt for a month after trying to escape a family holiday to join Islamic militants in the Sinai region.

He returned to Australia in January 2016 with the help of the Australian ambassador to Egypt. His father said his son was tortured in detention and spiralled downward after his return.

“Since Egypt, he’s having a hard time,” he told the court. “I said I would send him to a psychologist and everything would be all right.”

A psychologist, an exorcist, a maximum security prison, they’re all good.

Both boys have been on counter-terrorism radars for years and were being followed by police on the day of their arrest.

They both left their high school in 2014 due to an incident and the second boy turned to distance education while the first boy’s father tried to get him into several schools, eventually enrolling him in an inner west high school in 2016.

The second boy was intercepted on the phone in 2015 telling his mother he wanted to “outdo” the shooting of police accountant Curtis Cheng.

These kids are among the only people on earth who think Curtis Cheng’smurder was a good thing.

In a recording played by prosecutors during the bail application, he was filmed abusing police as he sat handcuffed in Adnum Lane, Bankstown on October 12.

“Whatever Allah orders me to do I’m going to do it,” he said.

“Anyone who works with the police is an apostate dog … youse are nothing but a bunch of pigs and we are going to rule this earth by sharia … all you pigs, inshallah, I will see you burn alive in hellfire.”

The pair had allegedly bought two bayonet knives earlier that day. Unable to find a bag to conceal them, the first boy was seen chucking his school books, pencil case and calculator in a bin and putting the knives in his backpack.

Gotta have priorities.

The boys’ barrister, Geoffrey Foster, said the case contained “a lot of circumstantial fluff” and content intended to “besmirch their character” and invent a “sinister plot”.

Bail was denied.