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SYDNEY, Australia — An assailant carrying a black flag with white Arabic script held hostages in one of this sunny city’s favored holiday haunts — a cafe specializing in chocolate drinks and desserts — through the day on Monday, throwing Sydney’s center into lockdown and shocking this nation with its worst hostage crisis in decades.
SYDNEY, Australia — Heavily armed police in Sydney stormed a cafe early Tuesday where an armed self-proclaimed sheikh had held hostages for more than 16 hours.
The assailant walked into the Lindt Chocolate Café, at the top of Sydney’s Martin Place in the city center, at around 9:45 a.m., the police said, locking the door and capturing an unknown number of cafe workers and customers. The cafe is as much a regular coffee stop for local office workers as it is a tourist draw.
Live television footage at the scene showed intense flashes of gunfire and the sound of loud ammunition rounds fired. Police were racing into the building with weapons drawn.
Helicopters hovered over the city, the train network was temporarily stopped and strategic buildings — including the nearby Sydney Opera House, the New South Wales Parliament, the state library, law courts and the Reserve Bank — were evacuated or shut down. Traffic on part of Sydney’s iconic Harbor Bridge was stopped.
Just before police appeared to enter the building at least six hostages were seen running from the cafe.
Five people, including two cafe employees, had fled by 7 p.m., but it was not clear whether the assailant had allowed them to leave or they had escaped.
The police released very little information about the scene inside the cafe or the suspect’s motives, though they were treating the siege as they would an act of terrorism.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, in a televised appearance from Canberra, the nation’s capital, referred to the suspect as “an armed person claiming political motivation.”
“This is obviously a deeply concerning incident,” he said in a statement. “But all Australians should be reassured that our law enforcement and security agencies are well trained and equipped and are responding in a thorough and professional manner.”
He said he had briefed the cabinet’s National Security Committee twice within six hours, and two ministers were returning from overseas, underscoring the seriousness of the siege.
Stephen Loane, the chief executive of Lindt Australia, said that nine or 10 employees were inside the cafe when the siege started, along with an unknown number of customers. “Originally, we were thinking it was a holdup,” he said, but “by the time I got down there, the streets were blocked off and there was a different situation.”
Soon after the siege began, a commercial television network, Channel Seven, which has a nearby studio, showed footage of people, one wearing the Lindt Café uniform, pressed against the cafe window, holding up the black flag with white script.
The message, though not entirely visible, appeared to be the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith.
The New South Wales deputy police commissioner, Catherine Burn, said that the police had made contact with the armed person inside the cafe, and that they were working to resolve the standoff “peacefully.”
“Nobody has been harmed or injured at the moment,” she said. “We have been working through our negotiations to try to make sure that people inside” have “what they need so that they don’t become ill or injured.'’
Offices near the cafe were evacuated and a number of streets were closed, the police said. The police also asked that people in offices nearby “remain indoors and away from open windows.”
Live television showed shoppers and office workers gathered some distance from the cafe, behind shelters, and television news showed heavily armed police officers in the area.
The United States Consulate General in Sydney, about a block from the cafe, was evacuated. A spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Canberra said that American officials did not yet know the nationality of the people being held.
The police did not say whether a terrorist group or an individual with links to terrorism was behind the siege.
But James Brown, a military analyst at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, said, “Someone in that shop wants us to know they have an Islamic link.”
He added: “They could be doing it for any one of a number of reasons; it could be a terror-related incident. It is unclear what outcome they want.”
Professor Adam Dolnik, who researches terrorism at the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales, said the hostage taker seemed likely to be either “a lone wolf sympathetic to the issues of the Islamic State and the goal of jihad more generally” or a case of “psychopathology in search of a cause.”
He said a lone gunman would have difficulty sustaining the siege for long, monitoring a large group of hostages without eventually needing sleep. And reports that the hostage taker had requested an Islamic State flag suggested poor planning. “That strikes me as an ego-driven personal demand rather than something you might expect from a terrorist group,” Mr. Dolnik said.
The siege was foreshadowed by a statement in September by an Islamic State spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, asking Muslims in Australia to carry out a lone-wolf attack. Mr. Abbott said then that the group’s followers had been instructed to pluck people from the street to conduct a demonstration killing.
On Sept. 12, Mr. Abbott raised Australia’s terrorism alert level to high from medium after warnings from the nation’s security officials that there were increased threats to the nation. He gave the police broader powers to arrest terrorist suspects and tightened restrictions on the news media’s reporting on national security matters.
Two weeks later, police officers in Melbourne fatally shot a man who attacked them with a knife.
In October, Mr. Abbott said Australia would join American forces in conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq, sending a squadron of fighter jets and several hundred Australian military personnel to the Middle East.
The decision was criticized by some analysts in Australia as likely to foment more anger from young Australian Muslim extremists.
The Australian Federal Police made seven arrests for terrorism offenses in the 12 months ending Oct. 31.
The black flag with the shahada has been used for centuries by Islamic groups, but in recent years it has been appropriated by jihadi groups including Al Qaeda and its affiliates.
If the cafe siege turns out to be a jihadi-inspired, it would be one of a handful of such attacks carried out outside of the Middle East in recent months, including one in Brussels and possibly two in Canada, and one in London last year.
Australian intelligence officials have estimated that about 70 Australian citizens, typically disaffected young Muslim men from immigrant families, have joined the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL. The passports of about 100 others have been canceled for fear they might do the same, they said.
The Grand Mufti of Australia, Professor Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, and the Australian National Imams Council issued a joint statement in which they said they “condemn this criminal act unequivocally.”
Lindt posted a statement to its Facebook page thanking people “for their thoughts and kind support.” The statement added that, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the staff and customers involved and all their friends and families.”
