Sisonke Msimang had no way of knowing the item she picked up while in the crowd at a Perth Invasion Day rally was what police allege was a homemade bomb designed to detonate on impact.
She also told 7.30 that police were slow to act when she approached them with the device, hidden inside a child’s sock.
“It’s supposed to be this childlike object, and it’s on the ground and it doesn’t look like anything, but at the same time, obviously it had a lot of really bad stuff inside of it,” Ms Msimang told 7.30.
Police allege it was a homemade fragment bomb containing a mixture of chemicals, nails, metal ball bearings and a fuse that was lit.
Police say a homemade fragment bomb was thrown into the crowd at Perth’s Invasion Day rally. (ABC News)
“I think I had a bit of a delayed reaction,” Ms Msimang said.
“My husband did say we could have had a very different week if things had gone differently, and that realisation is not a nice one.
“But I think for me, the overriding feeling was this sense that we had just gone to listen to a group of elders tell a story … and in the midst of that, to know that someone was trying to cause harm felt pretty awful.”
Police at the Invasion Day rally in Perth on January 26. (ABC News: Cason Ho)
Ms Msimang had gone to the rally with a colleague, a Noongar woman.
There were more than 2,000 people there.
“We were listening to speakers, watching,” she said.
“I saw this thing on my peripheral vision sort of flying towards me, and so I turned my head and I looked up.
“I saw this man, he was wearing all black, and it looked like something had left his hand because he was starting to move away, starting to walk the other direction away from the stage, and people were looking at him so there was like this kind of ripple effect.”
Sisonke Msimang saw an object fall from a balcony above.Â
“I turned to look at … this object that was in the middle, sort of two metres away from where my colleague and I were standing,” she said.
“We sort of looked at it for a little bit, probably three or four minutes, maybe a little bit longer. And it felt uncomfortable.”
She watched as members of the crowd came close to stepping on the object and decided to take it to police who were patrolling the rally.
“I very gingerly leaned forward and I picked it up and I held it … and I did peer down at it,” she said.
“The top of it sort of looked like glass, looked like it was made out of glass or it was like a glass jar or something, but I didn’t want to investigate further.”
Police not ‘super responsive’
She held it in her outstretched arm and made her way through the crowd.
“We saw the police. There were two police officers,” she said.
Police block access to the Murray Street Mall in Perth after the bomb scare. (ABC News: Keane Bourke)
“They were both on their mobile phones at the same time.
“It felt like a really long time because when you’re holding something that you don’t want to be holding, you kind of want his attention immediately. But after about a minute or so, he directed his attention to me.
“He wasn’t super responsive but he said, ‘OK, well, leave it with me.’ And then I was sort of, ‘Leave it with you how?’ I didn’t know how to hand it over physically and he was like, ‘Just leave it with me.'”
Ms Msimang then left the device at the officer’s feet.
“I walked away and it felt weird that he didn’t take my name or any details,” she said.
“The feeling that I had was that this is Perth, and things like this don’t happen in Perth, so there was a very sleepy feeling and response.”
Loading…]
Thirty minutes after the alleged home-made bomb was thrown, police reinforcements arrived and started to move the crowd.
“Somebody announced that there was a bomb, and then we really were like, ‘Well, could that have been what we were holding?’ Which was a pretty disconcerting feeling,” Ms Msimang said.
Police declined to comment on  Ms Msimang’s claims when contacted, instead directing 7.30 to their previous statement.
The day after the incident, Police Commissioner Col Blanch spoke about how quickly officers responded.
Police Commissioner Col Blanch said authorities needed to prove it was a terrorist act under the law. (ABC News: Keane Bourke)
“The reality is you don’t want to yell out ‘bomb’ because everyone will be running in circles and it won’t be an orderly evacuation,” he said.
“We wanted it controlled, we wanted it managed, and we used the organisers to do it.”
Officers arrested a man at the scene but it was only after nine days of investigation that the incident was declared an act of terror.
It marked the first time that charge has ever been laid in Western Australia.
WA Premier Roger Cook said the attack was motivated “by a hateful, racist ideology”. (ABC News: Courtney Withers)
“All of us in this room, all of us in our community, would have seen a bomb being thrown into a crowd on Australia Day at an Invasion Day rally as an act of terror. But to charge someone with a terrorism offence we need to prove the motivation and the ideology of that person,” Commissioner Blanch said on February 5.
WA Premier Roger Cook described the alleged attack as “motivated by a hateful, racist ideology”.
“We must take more responsibility for how our words and actions can give oxygen to hate,” Mr Cook said.
The arrested man’s identity was initially suppressed by the court. His lawyer argued his safety was at risk but on Tuesday a magistrate overturned the suppression order, allowing 32-year-old Liam Alexander Hall to be named.
Police speak to Liam Alexander Hall on the day of the Invasion Day rally. He is accused of throwing a homemade bomb into the crowd. (ABC News)
Police allege Hall was acting alone and had been “self-radicalised” by “pro-white material online”.
Community concerned
On Wednesday Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged the fear it had caused for First Nations people.
“We need to isolate these ideological extremes, and we need to reassert our values as Australians and this was a horrific attack on First Nations people that could have had catastrophic consequences had it been successful,” he said.
Organisers of the rally say the community is shaken up.
Perth Invasion Day rally organiser Fabian Yarran says “we’ve got to reassure people that we can’t let terrorism win”. (ABC News: Courtney Withers)
“We would’ve had a hundred people dead, a couple of hundred, or even more, injured,” said Fabian Yarran, one of the Noongar elders who organised the event.
“It’s scary to think that somebody from Australia actually wanted to take the lives of Aboriginal people and also their supporters.
“My son said, ‘Dad, don’t go to these things anymore.’ He said, ‘You might die, these people might come and get you again.’Â
“I was thinking, ‘Well son, it’s my duty to do truth telling every year, we have to organise this rally because between 3,000 to 5,000 people come to this.’
“I know how frightened people feel but we’ve got to reassure people that we can’t let terrorism win. These people have got to come back in masses next year, so hopefully we can double the crowd next year and make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV
Contact 7.30
Do you know more about this story? Get in touch with 7.30 here.