When the 5 hostages escaped, the gunman could be seen from here getting extremely agitated, shouting at remaining hostages
At 4.56pm the crowd outside Martin Place in Sydney drew close as two women dressed in brown Lindt aprons ran into the arms of a waiting police officer. Photos of the women clutching desperately to heavily armed police have become the standout images of the siege.
They replaced the blurry footage that emerged at 9.45am showing hostages pressed against the cafe’s front window while holding a black flag bearing the Shahada. The footage was picked up by Channel 7, whose Sydney studios are diagonally opposite the Lindt cafe and whose morning programs regularly show a live feed of Martin Place. It is likely that is why the Lindt cafe was targeted.
For several hours most passersby assumed that the police tape was due to a bomb scare, and were frustrated that they could not get to the bank nearby. Occasionally a worried face would hail a detective and whisper that a relative was in the cafe. They were directed toward a separate holding area.
Office workers were held in lockdown in neighbouring buildings until they could be escorted out by police. Some in the building above the besieged cafe slipped out using a ladder placed at the first-floor window.
Police use a ladder to evacuate a building near Lindt cafe in Sydney.Photograph: David Gray/Reuters
By midday the crowd in Martin Place had swelled to 300, and the rightwing anti-Islamic group Australia Defence League had put out a call on Facebook for its supporters to join them at the police line. One man tried to rile up the crowd by shouting that there was no such thing as a moderate Muslim.
Nadia El-Mouelhy, from Sydney, wearing a purple hijab, disagreed. “I am a moderate Muslim,” she told Guardian Australia. “If I took my headscarf off I would be just another member of the crowd. It’s just stupid. So stupid. You and I, we shouldn’t have to be here. This shouldn’t happen.”
At 3.35pm, three men including one Lindt employee ran from the cafe. Just over an hour later, the two women followed them. The rest of the hostages – the exact number is not known, but police have said it is under 30 – remained inside.
Police asked media not to reveal the identity of the man at the centre of the hostage negotiations. Footage from the Channel 7 news studios showed a middle-aged man wearing a bandana.
Media and passersby near Martin Place in Sydney.Photograph: Richard Milnes/Demotix/Corbis
Police said his exact motives were not known, and that the response had been declared a counter-terrorism operation. The deputy police commissioner Catherine Burn said officers had been in contact with the man throughout the day and were using a “very, very well-tested system of negotiation”.
Hostages reportedly called three Sydney newsrooms to relay the gunman’s demands. The Sydney shock-jock Ray Hadley claimed to have spoken to the gunman himself several times.
In the late afternoon, the #illridewithyou hashtag sprung up on social media in response to concerns from the Islamic community that the siege would promote another increase in racist attacks. Australia’s Islamic community has registered an increase in racist or religiously motivated attacks since the police raided Sydney homes in a counter-terrorism operation in August.
As the sun went down at around 8pm, the crowd had thinned to just over 100, mostly journalists or sightseers who had stopped off in the city after seeing 10 hours of rolling news coverage.
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