NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione has revealed his wife and daughter were in the Lindt Cafe on Martin Place about an hour before lone gunman Man Horan Monis took 17 hostages on Monday morning.

Scipione said his wife Joy and daughter Emma had gone to the city “to do a little bit of Christmas shopping”.

“Mother and daughter have a bit of tradition of coming in looking around, listening to the carols and looking at the stores and unbeknownst to me they both decided to slip down into Martin Place and have a look around in the Lindt shop,” Scipione told 2GB’s Ray Hadley on Saturday.

“Unbeknownst to me they both decided to slip down into Martin Place and have a look around in the Lindt shop.”

He said his family left the cafe “about an hour before” Monis, a self-styled cleric, entered the cafe in Martin Place around 10am, in a siege which lasted 16 hours before police stormed the building in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Monis was killed in the siege. Two hostages, Sydney Barrister Katrina Dawson, 38, and Lindt Cafe manager Tori Johnson, 34, also died.

“The irony is that they were shown through the shop – all of the chocolates, all of the things you would go there for – by Tori Johnson,” Scipione said.

“It’s been a sad place, my house, because particularly my wife Joy, reflected on this young man. She said, ‘Andrew he was so open and so caring, he was very very warm, friendly and he’s no longer with us’. That still causes many a tear to flow.”

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