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.
HMAS Sydney (D48)
The main claims made by supporters of an alternative view of the engagement include: that the Germans fired on "Sydney" before raising their battle ensign, or after using a flag of surrender or signals of distress to lure the cruiser in, that a Japanese submarine was partially or completely responsible for sinking "Sydney", that the involvement of the Japanese was covered up to lure the United States into the war, and that Australian survivors were killed in the water to eliminate witnesses. Other claims, less widely heard, include a belief that "Sydney" was not at action stations and thus not prepared for "Kormoran"s attack, distress calls from the cruiser were heard by Australian shore facilities but ignored, and that survivors were captured then executed by the Japanese. These claims have been proven false by historians and researchers; the 1998 inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee for Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade concluded that the German accounts were a "feasible" interpretation of the battle, but there was no reliable evidence to support any of the alternative claims, while the 2009 report for the Cole Inquiry (the third volume of which was completely dedicated to the "frauds, conspiracies and speculations" surrounding the battle) found nothing to substantiate any of the theories raised.