2014 Sydney hostage crisis
The 2014 Sydney hostage crisis, also known as the Sydney siege and Lindt Cafe siege, occurred on 15–16 December 2014 when a lone gunman, Man Haron Monis, held hostage ten customers and eight employees of a Lindt chocolate café located at Martin Place in Sydney, Australia. Police treated the event as a terrorist attack at the time, but Monis' motives were subsequently debated. However, the findings of the Coroner in 2017 deemed the event to be a terrorist attack.
Battle between HMAS Sydney and German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran
Michael Montgomery's 1981 book, "Who Sank The Sydney?", was the first published work to focus solely on "Sydney" and the events surrounding her loss, and the first to comprehensively challenge the accepted view of the battle. The son of "Sydney"s Royal Navy navigator, Montgomery could not accept the ship's loss as described by Gill, and claimed that the true events were being covered up. According to his book, "Kormoran" had fired on "Sydney" while flying the flag of a neutral nation, a Japanese submarine was involved in the battle, and any Australian survivors were killed to hide the involvement of the Japanese. Montgomery also suggests that Britain had foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred three weeks later, and ordered the Australian government to cover-up the truth of "Sydney"s loss so the United States would be drawn into the war. However, "Who Sank the Sydney?" is reliant on assertions that had been proved false, unreliable sources (including a 'sailor's report' found to be a translation of an inaccurate Australian newspaper article), and selective use of German accounts that fit the hypothesis, and Montgomery is generally credited with igniting the controversy surrounding the battle.