Kangaroo is the newest animal the Islamic State is using to sow terror in Australia

The Melbourne Magistrates Court ordered on Thursday a teenage suspect in a plot to bomb a Veterans’ Day ceremony in April 2015 to stand trial. Prosecutors told the court that Sevdet Ramadan Besim discussed with a Briton accomplice a plan to place bombs inside a kangaroo and set the animal loose on Australian cops.

However, the 19-year-old, who was ordered to stand trial in the Victoria state Supreme Court on charges of planning an Islamic State-inspired terror attack, pleaded not guilty to the charges. Besim and four others were arrested last week in Melbourne and are in detention.

Fox News reports that in online conversations with a Briton accomplice, Besim discussed packing the Australian animal with explosives painting the IS symbol on it and setting the animal loose in the direction of where the police officers are stationed for the Veterans’ Day rite. He also planned to use a vehicle to run over a police officer whom Besim would then decapitate.

The planned use of a suicide kangaroo shows a growing trend among supporters of the terror Islamic group to increase reliance on animals to perform bombing tasks instead of human suicide bombers amid tightening security measures by authorities. In December, an IS sympathiser proposed using a falcon or vulture to down war fighter jets of the Coalition.

The sympathiser proposed strapping a Urea bomb, a lightweight explosive, on a trained bird which would fly into an aircraft. Someone on the ground would then detonate the explosive. The proposal, though, has striking similarities with a terror plot in the 2010 British film “Four Lions” in which crows are tapped as suicide bombers, reports Yibada.

The use of avian by the military, however, is not new since pigeons, which apparently have natural GPS, have been used for decades to carry messages tied on the bird’s feet during the pre-Internet days. With tech giants such as Twitter cooperating with authorities to deny the IS use of technology as its propaganda tool, it is back to the basic for the Islamic terror organisation in reverting to animals as its way to hit the enemy.

Besim’s alleged accomplice, a 15-year-old from Blackburn, northwestern England, was given a life sentence with no chance of parole for five years by Manchester Crown Judge John Saunders.