Sydney, Sept 6 : Australian police cordoned off a Sydney building Tuesday in a tense standoff with a man who claimed to have a bomb, smashed a window and issued threats from a lawyer's office where he holed up with his teenage daughter.
The daughter appeared to be well, and police spent several hours trying to negotiate with the man, who claimed to have explosives in his backpack and appeared to be in his 50s, Police Assistant Commissioner Denis Clifford said.
The man claiming to have a bomb in a backpack stands at a window in a barrister's wig after taking his own daughter hostage.
The father is reportedly holding the 11-year-old girl at a lawyers' office after flipping earlier today.
He is said to have 'snapped' after demanding to speak to someone at the Arthurs Phillip legal chambers in Sydney, who nobody had heard of.
The girl was said to be carrying the backpack her father claimed contained the device.
Betty Hor, a clerk at the offices, said the drama began at 8:50am local time when the father came in asking for someone whose name she didn't recognise.
He briefly left before returning with his daughter and throwing a book at the reception area. She said: "He said phone the attorney general and call the person whose name I didn't recognise, I've got a bomb in my backpack."
Hor added: "He couldn't find this person, and I think he just snapped. I think she the daughter was surprised by his actions." The man later spat on the wig and issued cops with a string of demands after breaking a window with a glass bottle.
Officers are guarding the building in Parramatta, in the west of the city, with automatic weapons after setting up an exclusion zone.
Police Assistant Commissioner Denis Clifford said: "A male who we believe is in his 50s had entered some legal premises here in the company of a young girl we believe is in her early teens and who's carrying a backpack.
"Now, he has made some threats in relation to that backpack. We have police negotiators on the scene. They've been talking to the man for some hours now." The incident comes a month after a fake 'collar bomb' was strapped to a millionaire's teenage daughter at her home in the city. It took experts ten hours to get the device off Madeleine Pulver, 18, before realising it was an elaborate imitation.
Australian police cordoned off a Sydney building Tuesday in a tense standoff with a man who claimed to have a bomb, smashed a window and issued threats from a lawyer's office where he holed up with his teenage daughter. The daughter appeared to be well, and police spent several hours trying to negotiate with the man, who claimed to have explosives in his backpack and appeared to be in his 50s, Police Assistant Commissioner Denis Clifford said.
Australian broadcasters showed footage of the man looking from a second-floor window shirtless and wearing the kind of wig worn by judges and lawyers in Australian courts.
At one point he spat on the wig. He later swung a glass bottle like a hammer to smash a plate-sized hole in the office window. He yelled through the hole and threw the bottle, then a telephone handset, which was left dangling by its cord.
He extended his hand from the broken window to make a peace sign then threw out a note. Clifford said the note was to police, but declined to comment on its contents.
Clifford said the girl, who was apparently in her early teens, had spoken to police and appeared to be doing well.
"We don't believe there's any specific threat against the girl, but obviously we'd like to secure her release," he said. "The concern is that she's in a situation where we've got somebody with a backpack — we don't know exactly what's in that backpack so we have to assume that what he's saying is true."
Clifford declined to comment on media reports that the man was arrested Monday at a government building after he was involved in an incident at the state parliament in Sydney. Ten Network television news reported that the man had been charged in 1987 in connection with a protest over an Aboriginal man's death in custody.
"We're trying to reassure him that no one's here to harm him and, likewise, we hope he doesn't harm anyone else," Clifford told reporters. "Negotiators will continue for as long as it takes to try and end this situation peacefully."
A man believed to be holding a child hostage smashes a window at a lawyers office in suburban Sydney, Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011. Australian police cordoned off a Sydney building Tuesday in a tense standoff with the man who claimed to have a bomb, smashed the window and issued threats from the lawyer's office where he holed up with his teenage daughter. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)
Betty Hor said she was working at the reception desk at the lawyers' offices when the man approached Tuesday morning and asked to see someone whom Hor had never heard of. The man went upstairs briefly then returned to the reception desk and repeated his request. She repeated that she had never heard of the man he was looking for.
Police with automatic weapons stand outside a building where a man is believed to be holding a child hostage at a lawyers office in suburban Sydney, Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011. Australian police cordoned off a Sydney building Tuesday in a tense standoff with the man who claimed to have a bomb, smashed a window and issued threats from the lawyer's office where he holed up with his teenage daughter. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)
Hor, who spoke to reporters after evacuating the building, said that the man threw a book on her desk and told her to call the unknown man and the state attorney-general's department and "tell them I've got a bomb in my backpack."
Hor called police as the man walked upstairs to a lawyer's office with the girl, who called him "Dad." Hor said he seemed frustrated and angry. She said she had never seen him before.
Five ambulances and two fire trucks were standing by at the scene, while police directed traffic away from the area as the standoff extended through the evening rush hour. Clifford said he did not believe that the standoff had anything to do with the family court that adjoins the building.
Bitter family court cases have triggered some high-profile crimes recently in Australia, including the murder of a 4-year-old girl whose father threw her more than 260 feet (80 meters) from a bridge in the southern city of Melbourne in 2009. The father, Arthur Freeman, 37, was sentenced in April to life in prison after a jury rejected his plea of innocence due to mental illness.
Tuesday's standoff came a month after an extortionist broke into a Sydney home and fastened a fake bomb around the neck of a millionaire's teenage daughter. She spent 10 terrifying hours with the device strapped to her before police determined it was harmless and freed her. Australian Paul Douglas Peters, 53, is in jail in Louisville, Kentucky, awaiting extradition next month on charges in Australia that include kidnapping and breaking and entering.
