ASIO head cannot guarantee Australia of no terrorist attacks

Duncan Lewis, the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, warned that Australia might experience similar terrorist attacks in the future.

In an interview with the ABC, Lewis delved deeper into the threats that Australia face and explained what lessons were to be taken from the Paris attacks that left over 120 people dead.

The ASIO head is of the opinion that terrorism is such a phenomenon that leaves nations with no absolute guarantee of safety. He emphasised that Australian security and intelligence authorities were working hard to keep the menace at bay but insisted that there was no possible way to keep Australia or any other country totally safe from terrorist attacks.

“This is a significant challenge for intelligence and security agencies around the world. It is of course possible and we do in fact disrupt significant numbers of these attacks. We have the ability to do that. But what I am not able to do is provide any guarantee with regard to the future,” Lewis said in the interview.

He pointed out that attacks in Australia have been on the rise since 2014. "We have had three attacks involving fatalities and six thwarted attacks in the last 12 months," he added.

However, there has been no collection of information that could lead people to believe that an attack was evident in the near future, ABC reports. In September 2014, Australia's National Terrorism Public Alert level was shifted from medium to high, but Lewis assured that it need not to be moved to “extreme.”

Lewis said that the shift in security concern wasn’t linked to Australia’s involvement in airstrikes against the ISIS, citing that the nation has been on the hit list of terrorist attacks for a long time. In addition, he feels that Australians should be aware of the nature of ISIS and the activities the members carry out.

Speaking at the G20 summit in Turkey, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull asked Australians not to lose faith from the nation’s security agency and said that risks were quite well-contained and managed by them.

Similarly, Turnbull also didn’t rule out the possibilities of attacks in the nation. But he also assured Australians that they have one of the best security agencies in the world.

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