18/12/2020
Friday December 18, 2020
Lawyer says victim had 'serious mental health' issue, police try to highlight previous
counterterrorism probe

ANKARA —Police in Australia killed a young man of Somali origin who “made verbal and physical threats,” while his lawyer says the victim “clearly suffered a serious mental health event,” local media reported on Thursday.
Raghe Mohamed Abdi, 22, was “armed with a knife” when he was shot and killed by officers on a busy highway, ABC News reported.
With police trying to highlight that the victim was “previously investigated by a counterterrorism task force,” his lawyer accused authorities of “setting out to paint a person they've shot and killed in the worst possible light,” the report said.
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Officers found Abdi after receiving a welfare call about a man walking on a highway, according to Tracy Linford, deputy commissioner of Queensland Police.
She said the victim produced a knife as officers approached him so they “had to resort to using their police service fi****ms and have fatally shot that man.”
However, Terry O'Gorman, Abdi’s lawyer, said the “young man suffered a significant adverse mental health event yesterday and last night.”
Profiled past
According to the Australian Federal Police, Abdi was stopped from going to Somalia in May 2019 because it was believed that he was “influenced” by the Daesh terror group.
However, he was released without charge due to a lack of evidence, but his passport was canceled.
“In June 2019, he was charged with further offences, including refusing to hand over his passcode to his mobile phone,” said Ian McCartney, deputy commissioner.
He was remanded in custody for refusing “to answer the magistrate or acknowledge the authority of the court” and was only released on bail this September.
Abdi was being monitored by a GPS tracking device that was “tampered with” on Wednesday afternoon, the report said.
O'Gorman, his lawyer, stressed that there was “precious little evide
