HALIFAX – A Halifax woman and her family are safe following a tense evacuation of downtown Sydney, Australia during the ongoing hostage crisis.
Renee Field says she landed in Sydney Sunday for a family reunion, and was touring the city Monday morning. She passed the Lindt Chocolate cafe, minutes before the hostage taking occured.
As she was leaving, police flooded the area.
“I saw all these police cars and these SWAT teams and honestly, I was thinking ‘Oh, this is cool, they’re getting ready to film a movie,'” Field said. “They all had their body armour lying on the ground like getting ready to gear up, and I said, ‘I don’t think this actually is a movie.'”
She describes the scene as quiet and tense.
“It was absolutely dead silence in the downtown core of Sydney. People were moving. Moving very quickly, and they were not speaking. It was just to get out.”
Police told her to leave the area but as a tourist she needed a little help.
“We followed this young lady, she was a lawyer. She took us directly to the train station, apologizing all the time: ‘This never happens in Australia,'” she said. ” It was really nice to kind of have some sense of calmness, everybody was very calm very polite.”
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