53 years after this incident, we will learn about the details of this incident, what prompted Rohan to do so, and how the occupation acquitted him and returned him to his country.
Attempting to burn Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.. The story from the beginning
In July 1969, Michael Rohan arrived in Jerusalem from his home city of Sydney, and rented a small room in a hotel called Rivoli, which is 2.6 km away, about 30 minutes walking or 15 minutes by car.
For several weeks, he spent most of his time wandering around and inspecting the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its courtyards, in order to search for escape routes in order to plan his operation.
A few days before the burning of Al-Aqsa Mosque, and shortly after the ^Isha’ (evening) prayer ended and people left, Rohan made a failed attempt when he climbed a tree and entered the Qibli prayer hall (Mousalla), where he lit a fuse over some gasoline and fled the place by climbing the Jerusalem wall from the side of the Asbat Gate.
The next day, the Australian extremist went to the same place to check what had happened, but was surprised to see the remnants of the wick and a few spots of gasoline-burning on the ground.
The extremist Rohan waited for several days to return and do the same again, and chose the morning of Thursday, August 21, 1969, so he woke up early and arrived at the Qibli prayer hall at seven in the morning.
Upon his arrival, he went directly to the threshold of the pulpit of Salah al-Din, and took out from his bag a scarf that he had previously filled with petrol, and put it in front of the pulpit. He also sprinkled some petrol in the vicinity of the prayer hall and set it on fire.
No sooner had he walked out of the chapel door than the screaming of the people who had noticed the fire began to put it out.
The fire lasted for 5 hours, according to Reuters, due to the occupation forces cutting off the water to the entire area surrounding the mosque, as well as cutting off the roads to the Jerusalem fire engines.
However, Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem were able to put out the fire by relying on water wells in the area, and also through the help of some fire trucks that came from Hebron and Ramallah to help.
What prompted Rohan to burn Al-Aqsa Mosque?
Before coming to Jerusalem, Rohan was influenced by the so-called “Universal Church of God”, a controversial Christian sect that gained great popularity in the 1960s, founded by Herbert George Armstrong and whose mission is to interpret the corrupted Bible, especially prophecies that talk about the end of times according to them
But after the death of its founder Armstrong, the church administration modified these teachings to be consistent with the evangelical denomination.
One day, Rohan read an article published in 1967 by the founder of that sect, Armstrong, about a Jewish temple to be built in the city of Jerusalem in the place of Al-Aqsa Mosque, and that sacrifices would be slaughtered in the temple this time within the next four and a half years.
According to his later confessions, “after reading that article, he felt that he was sent by God and that he acted according to divine commands in line with the Book of Remembrance, so he tried to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque so that the Jews could rebuild the Temple and thus speed up the coming of the Messiah the Savior who will rule the world for 1,000 years.”
Michael Rohan’s trial
Hours after the fire, the occupation police managed to arrest Michael Rohan, but at first they claimed that the fire that targeted Al-Aqsa Mosque was caused by a short circuit, but after the engineers proved that it was not an electrical short that occurred, but rather an arson attack that was carried out by an unknown perpetrator. The occupying forces were forced to confess.
During his trial, his statements were consistent with those of witnesses, while his defense team insisted that he was a psychopath suffering from megalomania, or as it is called “paranoid schizophrenia” and that he was under the influence of delusions and fantasies when carrying out his crime.
In the end, the court ruled that Rohan was mentally incompetent and placed him in a psychiatric hospital until 1974 when his family pressed for his return and he was returned to Australia, where he died in 1995.
Despite Rohan’s admission that the so-called Universal Church of God was behind his push to burn Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Arab press indicated that Rohan is a Jew and that Israel is the one who pushed him to do so, as it has not stopped its attempts to obliterate the features of the Islamic identity of Jerusalem since 1948.
The fire caused significant losses
The fire left behind great losses, the most important of which was the burning of the pulpit of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, which was made by Nur al-Din al-Zanki in Aleppo in the hope that he would place it in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It contains copies of the Qur’an, in addition to the mosque of Omar, the mihrab of Zakaria, the shrine of the forty, and 3 galleries extending from south to north with columns, arches, decoration, and part of the ceiling that fell to the ground during the fire.
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