New evidence about the life of Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis before he came to Australia suggests he was a feared and wealthy member of the Iranian elite and may have been a government agent.
A witness who worked for Monis as an accountant in the Iranian capital, Tehran, said the future killer was then calling himself Mohammad Hassan Manteghi and had a business making "big money" on-selling truck tyres he obtained through government connections.
The man, who cannot be named and now lives in Australia, said Monis lived in a big apartment with his first wife and two daughters in a wealthy part of Tehran when he met him around 1992.
Monis came as a client to the firm where the man worked, setting in train a relationship that was never a friendship but rather, he said, a "boss-employee" arrangement.
That relationship involved strange dealings.
Around 1996 Monis suggested the man needed a holiday, bought him a ticket to Malaysia then joined him on the trip at the last minute.
On the way to the airport, he gave the man 12,000 German Deutschmarks to carry out of the country for him, before reclaiming the money and going off to attend to "business" soon after arriving in Kuala Lumpur.
When the man dislocated his shoulder and went to a public hospital in Tehran Monis disapproved and took him instead to a new, private hospital.
A security guard stopped them but the man said he saw Monis show him an ID card, immediately securing them entry.
"He looked a little scared," the man said.
Monis would later tell the man he had worked for the Iranian intelligence service.
Monis fled Iran in 1996 and claimed asylum in Australia, saying he feared persecution for his religion and for his politically provocative poetry.
There have been repeated allegations that Monis actually fled with $US200,000 of clients' money taken from a travel agency where he worked.
The witness said Monis did not deny taking the money when he met him again in Australia, after the witness was himself forced to flee Iran in 2000 after he was assaulted.
Around 2007 Monis, who had never been deeply religious, transformed into an extremist spouting anti-Western views and boasting of his offensive letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers.
One of the last contacts the witness had with Monis was in December, 2013, when he paid $10,000 bail after Monis was charged with being an accessory to the murder of his second wife.
He paid the money, he said, out of a sense of cultural obligation.
The man said he never believed Monis's claims of links to Islamic State, also known as ISIS, during the siege.
"He just done it for himself because he was always thinking he was better than the others," he said.
The siege inquest has now adjourned, with a closed session on national security issues to be held later this year.
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