Indeed the competing identities he claimed – self-styled peace activist, an alleged ayatollah, a firebrand sheikh, a carpet seller, and briefly, a nightclub bouncer – are difficult to reconcile and stretch credulity.
What we know is that Monis arrived in Australia in 1996 on a business visa as a representative of the Iranian government. By 2001, he had secured political asylum, claiming he had fallen out with the Tehran regime and faced execution if he returned.
That same year Monis was running a “spiritual healing” service that police would later claim he used to sexually assault a number of women.
He also made his first appearance in the Australian media, after erecting a tent outside the New South Wales parliament and chaining himself to the gate. He told ABC radio in 2001 that he was involved with the Iranian intelligence services, but fled the country because his liberal outlook clashed with Iran’s conservative rulers.
Monis said his wife and child were being held “hostage” by the regime in order to keep him quiet, and he hoped that his vigil on Macquarie street would bring attention to their plight.
In the early 2000s Monis decamped to Perth, where sources say he worked briefly as a nightclub bouncer and as labourer in a Persian carpet gallery.
His exploits in Sydney and flair for activism quickly became known.
A local Iranian radio producer was asked to feature Monis in an upcoming program, and he invited the self-styled intellectual for lunch at his home.
“He was a little bit serious, and polite, talking about the different clerics in Iran and all this,” the producer recalled.
But he quickly grew tired of Monis’ erratic, convoluted train of thought. “He was talking weird. I thought, he’s either over-educated or a crazy person,” he recalled.
Monis’ claims about the Iranian government detaining his wife and child concerned the producer, who regularly returns to visit family in the Iran, and didn’t want to risk making trouble. He finished the interview, thanked Monis and never saw him again. “I threw out the tape,” he said.
Monis was also dogged by allegations that he had been involved in a hundred-thousand dollar fraud in Iran, an allegation some British-based Iranian news outlets have repeated since his death. The rumours reached the owner of the Perth carpet gallery where Monis worked.
“When I realised about that, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him,” he said. “It isn’t like he needed the money.”
The man said it was clear that Monis had emotional difficulties. “He was up one day and down the next. One time he’d go to the discotheque, another time he was saying he was a representative of God,” he said.
But he was still surprised to see the bloody way Monis’ life ended.
“He was always look for someone’s attention. He was an attention seeker. I didn’t think he was the sort of man who would go in and murder someone,” he said.
Back in Sydney, Monis had little to do with the Iranian or Shia communities.
“He’s an unknown person,” Alaa Al-Ramadani, a prominent member of the community, said. “We don’t even see him, and we’ve been in the country for over 20 years.”
Others said Monis’ claims to have worked as a spy in Iran led some in the community to shun him as a collaborator with the regime.
Mohammed Basim Alansari, the head of the office of the Ayatollah for Australia and Abroad, said Monis’ first forays into the spotlight inspired derision within the community.
“When he first started appearing in a Shia turban, it was very funny, because we didn’t know who he was. He didn’t have any credentials, nobody knew him,” he said.
“On one hand he said he practiced astrology and black magic, and on the other hand he said he was a cleric. But Islam forbids astrology and black magic.”
Around the time he started sending letters to the families of deceased Australian soldiers in 2008, Monis was in regular contact with Iqbal Patel, then the vice-president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.
“He was trying to engage with me with very strong views,” Patel said. “After a certain period of time he stopped having any engagement at all. There were letters and emails expressing views that were bordering on extremist.”
Patel said Monis was insistent the federation should “engage on matters in a much stronger manner”, particularly on issues such as the illegal detention of Indian doctor Mohammad Haneef, the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2009, and prisoner abuses in Guantanamo Bay.
“He thought we’d organise protest marches, galvanise Australian Muslims to oppose the government,” Patel said. “I came to the conclusion he was mentally unstable, he wasn’t right up there.”
Patel said that few, if any, members of the Muslim community fraternised with the man, nor did he belong to a particular mosque.
“I also felt the man needed help, but I knew the authorities had him under surveillance, they were engaging with him. I felt he was being looked after,” he said.
Monis faced court in 2009 accused of sending “grossly offensive” letters to the widows and families of deceased Australian soldiers. He was convicted, but continued to appeal the decision until last Friday, when his application to have the case heard in the High Court a second time was rejected.
Confoundingly, though he received a two-year good behaviour bond for the letter-writing campaign in 2013, Monis still managed to secure bail on two subsequent matters; one of being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife, the other on more than 40 counts of sexual and indecent assault.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Tuesday that Monis applied for bail on the accessory to murder charge just days after reforms came into effect that substantially lowered the threshold for granting release.
Earlier presumptions against bail for serious offences were replaced with a two-step test, asking whether the accused posed an “unacceptable risk” of reoffending, and whether that risk could be mitigated by locking the accused up. A magistrate argued that the case against Monis was weak, and that if he did pose a threat, “it was to this woman who was murdered”.
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, too, has raised questions about how a man with Monis’ past was not high on the terror watch lists kept by the country’s security agencies.
Despite his radical inclinations and previous brushes with the law, Monis also managed to somehow secure a shotgun, its barrel short enough to fit inside a blue sports bag.
In August, just months before he seized a cafe in Martin Place, Monis returned to study, taking courses in fitness and business management at a training college in Bankstown.
One of his teachers described him as a “polite, lovely man”. When he met with her before enrolling he was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, sporting only a short beard, far from the wild-eyed extremist his tangles with the law would suggest.
Still, she said, “I did pick that he had mental issues.”
Monis’ attendance record was spotty. “When he was in class, he wasn’t harmful, he was very quiet, but he would do weird things like suddenly stand and say, ‘I’ve got to go’,” she said.
Attempts to force him out of the class were unsuccessful, and about a month ago, Monis stopped attending altogether.
The teacher recalled that after his final few classes he would hang around the centre, and she would watch him curiously as he paced up and down the hallways, agitated, utterly consumed in his thoughts.
