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HE orders a skinny flat white.

He is in a hurry, yet there’s time to admire the vaulted ceilings of the former bank chamber.

The four well-dressed ladies around the corner seem so happy. Here’s an old fellow alone at a table. Then, they call his name. “Chris?” Wow. That was quick.

Chris Kenny does not see a middle-aged man with the scruffy beard, a father of four who likes his coffee.

He is sitting at a table, a sawn-off shotgun in a blue bag, chatting with the cafe manager.

Kenny, a senior journalist at The Australian, is walking out the door.

His phone is ringing and his mind is elsewhere. It’s 5AA, a South Australian radio station, for a pre-arranged interview.

Kenny sits at an outside table, a few metres from the automatic doors. He discusses the state Liberal Party’s apparent need for generational change.

As he finishes, three motorcycle police pull up with sirens blaring.

A woman tells officers she has tried to enter through the cafe’s sliding doors. They have been locked shut.

UNIMAGINABLE END FOR A PERFECT LIFE

10 FATEL FAILURES THAT LED TO TRAGEDY

NINE SILENT MINUTES THAT BEG SO MANY QUESTIONS

DUMP HIS BODY AT SEA, MUSLIM LEADERS SAY

BARISTA ELLY CHEN ESCAPED WITH LIFE

Kenny’s interview started at 9.40am. He may have been the last person to walk through the sliding doors of the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place.

He belongs now with David Johnson, the Lindt cafe worker given the day off, and his colleague Bruno, who turns up just before 10am for his shift.

He belongs with us, on the outside, if only just, in the chaos of sirens and roadblocks, where the confusion is captured by a Sydney cabbie blocked in Elizabeth St: “Bastards. Terrorism in Sydney. My god.”

INSIDE the cafe, palms are pressed against glass.

The mood Kenny witnessed has dissolved in the theatrics of a movie scene, starring a villain who delivers bad lines for the next 17 hours.

Eighteen staff and customers have been ordered to put their hands up.

They have been told to lie down. There are screams and sobs. Someone vomits.

The man with the bandana and the shotgun wants to be called “the brother”.

He says he is from the Islamic State. He says he has bombs.

Man Haron Monis is doing what he has done since he arrived in Australia in 1996.

As a proclaimed IS extremist, he is pretending to be something he is not: until recently, before the most unlikely of conversions, he was a Shi’a - not Sunni — Muslim.

He has terrorised before, by words and deeds, though not like this.

He has chosen an unusually nice grouping of people to menace.

John O’Brien, the 82-year-old, is on his annual ritual of a coffee after his eye check-up upstairs. Three lawyers, including Katrina Dawson and her pregnant colleague Julie Taylor are catching up.

Dawson is indulging a daily routine in being here: she had asked along another friend this morning, but she had missed the call.

Among four Westpac people is the Indian father, Viswakanath Ankireddy, who would ring his wife during the crisis and his colleague, Puspendu Ghosh, still abuzz from a recent skydive. Selina Win Pe is with them to discuss IT issues: soon, under threat of a gun, she will be making demands of a prime minister.

The cafe staffers, their fellow prisoners, share a genuine camaraderie that defies many workplaces.

Tori Johnson, 34, is the sort of manager who sticks his tongue out in Christmas Party photos.

He is from a close-knit family: he hopes to one day marry his partner of 14 years, Thomas Zinn.

The staff share qualities with their customers that Monis can not claim.

They laugh in their spare time. They love. They have much to give and stand to be missed.

They belong on the outside. Monis, it subsequently seems, has never belonged.

Monis has a plan.

Like all his plans it runs short of a logical conclusion. As far as it goes, it succeeds within the first hour or so.

His impact is almost Dystopian. The streets are emptied and barricades rise. Trains are stopped and offices are evacuated.

The Martin Place Christmas tree suddenly soars like a relic from another era.

Elly Chen, normally a smiley 22-year-old, is working only her sixth day at the cafe.

She holds up a black flag with white Arabic text to the window, directly behind the cafe company’s Christmas message.

It is an opening shot in Monis’ message which, like all of Monis’ messages, runs foul of logic.

And there is a lag, almost as if the world is granted time to process events.

For hours, no one is saying what is going on. Monis wants to speak to Prime Minister Tony Abbott. He wants his siege to be announced as an attack by ISIS.

He orders an ISIS flag delivered. He has hostages deliver these messages to news outlets from about noon.

It’s still unclear how soon dialogue is established with police negotiators.

O’BRIEN has a headache when he spots his chance.

It’s maybe five hours since he would have left of his own accord, perhaps for a hit of his beloved tennis.

He, along with lawyer Stefan Balafoutis, has been allowed to go to the toilet.

They spot a green button at the bottom of a glass door and wonder if the button will open the door. They discover it does.

The cameras track their first uncertain steps on the street, driven by an overwhelming mix of relief and adrenaline, while TV commentators fumble for the right verb — release or escape?

Chen’s expression captures the same anguish and fear when she spills into the street soon afterwards.

She has followed colleague Paolo Vassallo, and precedes Bae Jie-Un.

Monis is enraged by the escapes. He speaks of “an eye for an eye”. None of his demands have been met.

What would have followed had they been — he promised limited releases of hostages for each — is unclear.

Jarrod Hoffman is one of several hostages ordered to spread Monis’ gospel.

It is probably Hoffman, a 19-year-old student, who rings 2GB’s Ray Hadley.

Hadley reports hearing a Middle-Eastern Australian voice giving instructions in the background.

More calls are later made to the Daily Telegraph and TV stations.

Hoffman explains that he is on speaker and that he has a gun pointed to his head. “If someone else runs, someone dies,” Hoffman explains.

Later in the day, Monis orders hostages to record video messages for media organisations.

They are sinister viewing. The hostages speak of “we”, as if they are willing.

Some look more nervous than others. Taylor is businesslike: “We are here with ... ummm our brother, who has asked for three simple things, and the first is that Tony Abbott calls him, live in the media, to have a short conversation. . . we can’t understand why that hasn’t happened.”

Mother-of-three Marcia Mikhael has been pressed into Facebook postings by early afternoon. Her formalness is unusual in the social media age, but then again, her words read like a poor joke.

Like Taylor, she is a very successful person, a Westpac executive and fitness business owner. Yet no one inside the cafe can argue against Monis, a nobody in the outside world.

Onlookers feel surges of futility.

Yet only the hostages burn with the violation of being manipulated as pawns. Only they can properly express the growing fear reflected in increasingly tense messages.

“Dear friends and family...” Mikhael’s Facebook message reads.

“The man who is keeping us hostage has asked for small and simple requests and none have been met. He is now threatening to start killing us.”

Such communications are unprecedented, at least in Australia.

They are a product of a new age of technology and terror. Media outlets mostly heed police bans and do not publish or broadcast Monis’ messages.

Yet Monis grabs some underground traction. He resorts to YouTube and these video messages are said to spread.

The hostages’ families, meanwhile, are fretting.

“Please do not share or spread any messages released by the hostages as the terrorist is using them as a means of communication,” writes Mikhael’s niece. “This could put my aunty and the others in grave danger.”

Another hostage, Fiona Ma, uses Facebook as a source of hope. She has been posting and reading messages throughout the day, prompting this latter message: “I’m getting your messages everyone! Thank-you you beautiful souls...Guys I love each and everyone of you.”

OVER 17 hours, Monis does not get what he wants.

Instead, he muddles and confounds.

In doing so, like in his past, he inspires others to rise above his “antics” — as one acquaintance puts it — and seek to overcome the hurt he inflicts.

The hostages have a world’s prayers. It isn’t enough, not on this battleground, not even with hundreds of heavily armed cops just metres away. Monis has an unfair advantage. He has unpredictability — and his gun.

His skittishness grows later in the day. He paces and herds the hostages from one end to the other — this followed rotations when hostages held their hands on the windows.

He shouts and uses Louisa Hope, an MS sufferer with a walking stick as a “shield”. Later, Monis still grips her as he started to tire, despite the protests of her 68-year-old mother, Robyn.

The refusals of her and O’Brien to yield to an armed crazy man’s wishes sound like the makings of folklore.

O’Brien has refused to hold Monis’ flag or lie on the floor for him. Monis, according to a report in The Australian, leaves him alone after this.

It is many hours after O’Brien has gone.

Australia has gone to sleep, knowing the police will wait it out. It is about 2am, and fear and exhaustion are major factors.

The next 15 minutes stand to be forensically analysed in months ahead. For now, we must rely on witness accounts and unofficial sources.

We know that a plot has been hatched after Monis says “it will be in the morning”.

Comic book fan Joel Herat, 21, is a ringleader. A group of hostages figure that death will follow inaction.

A single shot rings out at 2.04am. It is said that the bullet slams into a door or the ceiling. Is it a warning shot aimed at dissuading those hostages who soon appear, arms raised, in the street? Herat shepherds a pregnant 30-year-old Taylor before making his own exit.

The hostages have smashed a side-door lock to escape. Ankireddy’s father sees his son’s escape on Indian TV.

The cafe is darkened. It’s said that Johnson now tackles Monis and tries to grab his gun. It makes sense that Johnson would try to free his fellow hostages.

Such an act sounds true to his nature.

One newspaper report says that Johnson is beaten around the head before being killed with a head shot by Monis’ gun.

This may be the 2.13am shot that is played again and again the next day, the shot that leads a technical support sniper, perched at a Channel 7 window opposite, to say into his microphone: “Hostage down. Window two.”

What follows is officially known as the “emergency action plan”. Police in night goggles break in, setting off what looks and sounds like an indoor fireworks display. Stun grenades echo. Dozens of rounds are fired.

The outburst is timed at 34 seconds. When it ends an alarm rings and there is screaming. Monis is dead.

His shield Louisa Hope is shot in the foot, her mother Robyn in the shoulder.

Katrina Dawson is fatally wounded. Her loss, like Johnson’s, is inexplicable, and the floral memorial for their loss will lend itself to easy comparisons with Princess Diana’s death in 1997. It will seem so right that Johnson loved flowers.

It will seem so wrong that Dawson’s children, aged eight, five and three, wake the next morning to the worst news.

According to Channel 7, Monis greets the rush of officers with a lament: “Look what you’ve made me do.”

AS epitaphs go, Monis’ final words sound about right.

They befit a predator long practised in the role of playing the victim. They also raise questions about Monis’ goals. The only obvious thread in his public history, besides its oddness, lies in his drives. His religious and moral principles hold no coherence. His need for attention, however, is a constant. Publicity for Monis has never been a byproduct so much as an outcome.

In upturning his past in the days after his death, the thoughts of one of his previous victims jump out.

Joan Senger once received a letter from Monis. Her son, Craig, an Australian trade official, had been killed in the 2009 Jakarta terror bombing.

Monis’ words had been hurtful and insulting. Speaking in 2013, Mrs Senger appears to have figured out Monis long before he stopped a city with a gun.

“I just don’t think he thinks like normal people think,” she said.

Unpredictable. Unhinged. Paranoid. These terms are used by those who knew Monis best. He was well-known to others as the sick sod who had linked fallen soldiers and bushfire victims to obscure religious scriptures.

He had been seeking sympathy since he first chained himself to a pole at the NSW Parliament House in 2000, when he demanded his family be brought from Iran and introduced himself as “Ayatollah”.

Those who knew him knew he played at roles. He was the “sham sheikh”.

He was the “peace activist”. Yet his performances served to mask the villain within. Monis tended to be scorned rather than feared, even though his history is potted with extreme violence and misogyny.

His attempts at greatness were so unconvincing that it appears they may have protected him.

His nastiness got distorted in his silliness — last year, photographed outside court in white shoes, white pants and a white jacket, he resembled a small-time pimp lifted from the 1970s.

Monis failed at things. Yet he never failed to assume a front of absurd self-importance. For years, he wrote letters to police and politicians and security agencies, decrying gays and including a public tract about the Bali Bombers, that “holy group of martyrs”. He begged to be noticed, to be rolled into the bigger equation, to be taken seriously.

He bounced from one shabby rental to the next, ducking from neighbours. He met his ex-wife to discuss custody of the children in a McDonald’s carpark — her claim that he threatened to shoot her has emerged only now, three-and-a-half years later.

Every vocation had fizzled. He was on the dole. He had few if any credentials. Yet in conversation with experts, he seemed incapable of heeding advice. “Never did I imagine that he could be dangerous,” one close acquaintance told the Daily Telegraph this week.

Yet Monis was dangerous. He had been for years. That he was on bail for heinous crimes, and had been dropped off official terrorist watch lists, are questions for any number of official inquiries.

It seems doubtful that Monis should have been welcomed to Australia at all. Was it political asylum he sought in 1996 or flight from the law for theft from a travel company?

What we know is this. On Monday, Monis performed his final role. It seemed as unfocused and nonsensical as the previous parts, but he wasn’t to be brushed aside, not this time. He played at being a terrorist in the name of religion.

There, in the grainy pictures, he was exposed for the unholiest of missions. He wanted flags and demanded talks but Monis’ acts seem to amount to nothing more than a full-scale assault for attention. He’d been dropping big hints for almost two decades. Only now did the impostor, finally, wear new clothes.

IT’S unclear where Monis last slept.

Was it the anonymous little house in Belmore, in Sydney’s west, or the anonymous little flat a few kilometres west, where socks hang out to dry on the balcony a few days after his death?

Both abodes stamp his ordinariness: they also go to the line about the banality of evil. As do the neighbours who recall a tall figure, sans robes, who seemed to shrink from his everyday surrounds.

Monis’ transience can be tracked by his court appearances. Geographically, if not mentally, he seemed to be neither here nor there.

Over recent years, he has offered at least four different addresses to the justice system.

He lived in Alfred St, Clemton Park, for a couple of years until he was charged with being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife last year. Like his other homes, this place suffers for want of love and money.

One tale goes that Monis refused to answer the door when a neighbour needed to discuss a mutual problem concerning a tree. Monis’ girlfriend Amirah Droudis often appeared in the afternoon with a school-aged girl in uniform, thought to be her daughter, before later departing each day.

On weekends, about a dozen robed Muslim men would pray in Yatama Park opposite Monis’ then home. Only a few metres from the closest home, their proximity frazzled the homeowner.

Then, Monis disappeared. He was in jail where, he later claimed, his cell was smeared in excrement. Conditions on his immediate release, according to a resident of York St, Belmore, were not much better.

She says she found him sleeping on her nature strip, opposite the home of Droudis’ parents. They weren’t talking this week — a reporter who knocked on their door was told the police would be called. At the time, Monis didn’t want to explain either. It was stinking hot. Instead he asked for and received water.

Monis more recently gave another address in Denman Avenue, Wiley Park. One neighbour here knows the man who appeared to live in the ground-floor flat with the younger woman and girl. He said hello to Yesento Kamara and seemed “nice enough”.

Kamara heard voices and watched the police enter the flat a few hours into the hostage drama in Martin Place. Inside, behind the closed curtains, the scene is as disordered and random as his thinking: paint tins, a stuffed crate, a shopping trolley.

The man had left so little impression that Kamara does not realise that her downstairs neighbour is the gunman on TV until the Daily Telegraph points it out. “I’m shaking now,” Kamara says, her little boy clinging to her leg. “This is a nice area. No problems.”

Some media outlets found out the identity of the gunman hours before Monis’ name was publicly released late on Monday night.

The reaction of criminal lawyer Adam Houda helps explain a police request to suppress the information.

Houda took to Twitter almost immediately to describe his short-lived client. “Mad as a cut snake” Houda posted.

It was about six years ago. Houda remembers it well — Monis, after all, stands as his “strangest client” in 18 years.

Houda received a phone call from a woman.

She explained that an important cleric was to be charged over the sending of letters to the families of fallen Diggers.

Monis amplified the pomposity when he turned up. He ranted. He barred the woman, who Houda assumes was Monis’ ex-wife Noleen Pal, when she attended a meeting. She did not speak.

“One of the first things I decided on meeting him, within minutes, was that I was going to have him psychiatrically assessed because nothing made sense for the guy,” Houda says.

At his first court appearance, Monis agreed not to talk to the press. At least, Houda thought he had agreed to.

On leaving, Monis produced a chain and tied himself to the Downing Centre steps. He distributed posters and delivered speeches throughout the day. Houda sacked him as a client.

By then, Houda had asked lots of questions. Monis wouldn’t tell him about his upbringing or community ties. Others hadn’t been able to fill the factual voids. Monis had yet to rejected by the wider Muslim community. He was a ghost: it seems Monis was as eager to smudge the

past as shift the future. “Nobody knew him,” Houda says. “He had no students, no following, no affiliations, no nothing.”

YET Monis had been noticed.

Sheik Kamal Mousselmani, Australia’s most senior Shia Muslim leader, had explored Monis’ website and identified his amateur knowledge of Islam.

This week, Sheik Moussemani revealed that he had asked the Australian Federal Police to investigate Monis in 2008.

Monis had come to the justice system’s notice on other matters, too. Pal gave evidence after Monis was charged with intimidation in 2011. She had taken out an Apprehended Violence Order because she was worried “that he could just attack me, become violent”.

As Houda attests, their relationship appears odd. They met through one of his ads as a “spiritual healer”. He claimed to be a psychic, but prosecutors, in laying charges earlier this year, argue that Monis exploited women to sexually assault and rape them. They laid 50 counts involving seven victims.

Pal told authorities in 2011 that he had told her he had access to firearms. He was paranoid during visits, demanding that doors be closed and blinds drawn because he feared their conversations would be heard.

Her mother, Marian Pal, said she had once stopped him hitting Noleen.

The charges were dismissed in May 2012. In April 2013, Pal was killed when she went to pick up her sons from Monis’ flat in Werrington. She was stabbed 18 times and set alight. Pal reportedly begged: “No, I’ve got kids.”

Droudis was later charged with the murder, Monis as an accessory. Prosecutors later argued that Monis staged chest pains, a home robbery and a car accident in establishing an alibi.

The submissiveness of Monis’ wife in front of Houda is described by a subsequent lawyer, Hugo Ashton, with subsequent partner Droudis, who changed her name from Anastasia after they met. She, too, faced charges relating to the letters to the families of fallen soldiers, and Ashton would refer her to another lawyer. Yet he noticed a “sort of obedience from her to him”, “as if he was some sort of master”.

Monis preached “peace activism”, but his new lawyer was as unimpressed as the previous one. Monis was not driven by Islam, but rather ignorance and a thirst for publicity. Monis was not menacing, but he was adamant of tone. He liked things his way.

He was obsessive from the start, Ashton surmises, and Monis felt the case was critical to his reputation. Ashton represented Monis until the High Court early last year chose (3-3) not to uphold Monis’ claim that the charges were invalid.

Ashton says Monis saw the decision as just another obstacle. Monis faced 300 hours’ community service, but his cause was far deeper than avoiding a penalty. (Monis’ case was funded through Legal Aid. One estimate puts the cost to taxpayers at $120,000).

“I think he was hoping it would have a bearing on his credibility,” Ashton says. “Let’s not forget he was ostracised by the Islamic community. He was a fake. He was putting on a show. He was trying to play the role of Sheikh Haron.”

“This pen is my gun,” Monis had declared at one of his early hearings in his so-called fight for peace. Last Friday, Monis’ final appeal against his conviction — a constitutional challenge — was quashed.

Three days later, he armed himself with a gun. His possible motives for the siege assume a perverted logic through the lens of Monis’ vain fight for relevance.

Pal’s brother, Talat Khalik, was interviewed on British television this week. “(The siege) could have been avoided if the system was right over there,” he said.

It’s a point well-raised. Yesterday, the breadth of Monis’ conceits were still widening. His story can not be told without listing systemic failings.

Monis’ liberties raise policy concerns about visa applications, extradition treaties, bail conditions, Legal Aid approvals and gun controls.

Answers to every one of these issues are owed to the families of Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson. They are also due to every Australian, lest the rise of other oddballs who have dodged so many safeguards.

Monis was a shameless self-promoter. Yet he hid in system kinks that are supposed to protect us from the likes of his sinister thinking, even as his website posted videos in praise of the Bali bombings, the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks. In one video, a woman thought to be Droudis spoke of rape: “It is not fair if we condemn the rapist without condemning the one who has encouraged the rape.”

ELLY Chen and other hostages have made repeated visits to Martin Place since Monday night.

They present the best of the human spirit. Their public shows of unity and strength have knitted the strands of grief. Other hostages have suffered in private. Their reactions are just as understandable. Trauma is good at showing up textbooks.

The conflicted feelings of Chris Kenny are not logical, as such, but they do follow the guidelines. All week, people have told him how lucky he was to have been so close to the siege and to have avoided it. He knows he ought to feel fortunate. And he does.

Yet Kenny thinks more about what happened to those “stuck on the other side of the glass”. They are why he wandered back to Martin Place late on Wednesday night, when he thought it would be quiet (it wasn’t), to leave flowers. Kenny carries a “strange, ceaseless feeling of guilt”.

“No one should feel lucky in this country for being able to walk into a cafe, get a takeaway coffee, and walk out,” he says. “That’s not lucky. That’s just normal.”

HARRIETTE DENNY

Age: 30

Occupation: Lindt Cafe worker

Worked at the store for 12 months. Returned to the scene with fiance on Wednesday to place roses on a photo from this year’s Lindt Cafe Christmas party.

JULIE TAYLOR

Age: 35

Occupation: barrister

Pregnant colleague of Katrina Dawson

One of three women forced to record a video detailing gunman’s demands. Held the Islamic flag in the shop window.

MARCIA MIKHAEL

Age: 43

Occupation: Westpac bank executive

Mother of three who was carried out of the Lindt cafe by police. Recovering in Royal North Shore after surgery to a gunshot wound to the leg.

During the siege posted on Facebook: “He is now threatening to start killing us. We need help right now.”

SELINA WIN PE

Age: n/a

Occupation: Westpac employee

One of three women forced to record a video. Spoke to the media by telephone. She begged a reporter: “Get us the hell out of here, please.”

STEFAN BALAFOUTIS

Age: n/a

Occupation: commercial law barrister

The Greek-Australian was the second hostage to escape from the cafe and gave details to police of the situation inside.

JIEUN BAE

Age: 20

Occupation: Lindt Café worker

The 20-year-old Korean student escaped with co-worker Elly Chen.

“I thought I would die in there. I can’t believe what happened to Tori (her boss).”

LOUISA HOPE

Age: 50

Occupation: n/a

Emigrated from the UK seven years ago. Used as a human shield during the siege. Shot in the foot and is in a stable condition in hospital after surgery.

ROBYN HOPE

Age: 68

Occupation: retired

The mother of Louisa Hope. Shot in the shoulder and is in a stable condition in hospital after surgery. Was in Sydney with her daughter as a pre-Christmas treat.

PAOLO VASALLO

Age: n/a

Occupation: Lindt Cafe worker

Married father of three and was one of the first hostages to escape on Monday afternoon. Taken to hospital for observation because of a pre-existing condition but later released.

KATRINA DAWSON

Age: 38

Occupation: barrister

The mother of three children under 10, spent most of the 16-hour siege protecting and comforting her pregnant friend Julie Taylor. She died on the way to hospital after the siege ended.

TORI JOHNSON

Age: 34

Occupation: Lindt Cafe manager

Died reportedly trying to wrestle the shotgun from the hands of Man Haron Monis.

His former boss, Peter Manettas, manager of Nick’s Seafood where Mr Johnson worked for six years, told the Daily Telegraph, “He was an amazing person, a selfless person, a person who always put other people before himself.

JOEL HERAT

Age: 21

Occupation: Lindt Cafe worker

A cartoon lover, he was one of the ringleaders whose group decided to kick down an internal cafe door to try to escape. It is believed this action led to Monis firing his first shots.

JOHN O’BRIEN

Age: 83

Occupation: retired.

The first hostage to escape. “I’ve never felt so much relief”. The former tennis star Mr O’Brien, from Maroubra in Sydney’s east, was seen gesticulating at police as he told them of the hostages’ dire predicament.

JARROD MORTON-HOFFMAN

Age: 19

Occupation: student

Youngest hostage forced to relay the gunman’s demands to the media including Sydney radio host Ray Hadley. “I have had a shotgun put at my head ... we are all afraid”.

FIONA MA

Age: 19

Occupation: student.

Posted emotional but upbeat messages on social media during the siege. The high achiever is a recent high school graduate from Agricultural College

VISWAKANTH ANKIREDDY

Age: 32

Occupation: software engineer

Father of one from West Bengal, India, who is employee of multinational tech giant Infosys. Is in Sydney working on a project for Westpac.

PUSPENDU GHOSH

Age: n/a

Occupation: project manager

Colleague of Viswakanth Ankireddy at Infosys. Escaped the siege unharmed but was treated for trauma. Mr Ghosh had been making the most of the Sydney lifestyle, going skydiving — which he described as “an amazing experience” — and taking up scuba diving.

ELLY CHEN

Age: 22

Occupation: Lindt Cafe barista

Fifth hostage to escape. Forced to hold up the Islamic flag which read, “There is no god but Allah. And Muhammed is his messenger.”

Originally published as Sliding door tragedy of the Lindt cafe