Denis Michael Rohan

Rohan was arrested by Israeli authorities on 23 August 1969; he was tried in Israel, found to be insane, and subsequently admitted to a mental institution. On 14 May 1974, Rohan was deported to Australia "on humanitarian grounds, for further psychiatric treatment near his family" and transferred to the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane on the outskirts of Sydney. Some sources claim that he died in 1995, but a 2009 investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) found that was still alive. Rohan also spoke to an ABC journalist a few years after the findings.

On the morning of 21 August 1969, Rohan started a fire fuelled by kerosene in the al-Aqsa Mosque. The fire destroyed an intricately designed 12th-century minbar, or pulpit, known as the minbar of Saladin.

On 26 September 1969, Armstrong, in a letter to financial contributors to his The World Tomorrow program, distanced himself from Rohan:

Prior to the Rohan incident, in 1968 Armstrong, via WCG's sponsored Ambassador College, had become involved with the Israeli government in archaeological digs in the area of the Temple Mount.

His attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque, which began after he set fire to the Minbar of Saladin, inflamed tensions across the Muslim world and triggered the most high-level crisis in the Middle East since the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.

Rohan was a subscriber of The Plain Truth magazine published by the Worldwide Church of God's (WCG) founder Herbert W. Armstrong and stated that he had begun his attempt after reading an editorial by Armstrong in the June 1967 edition. The Daily Telegraph newspaper in London pictured Rohan on its front page with a copy of The Plain Truth magazine sticking out from his outside jacket pocket.

According to a detailed article by Abraham Rabinovich, Rohan's first known case of auditory hallucinations (which he believed to be divine "revelations") came in Australia in 1964, when he was asked by his employer to transport "an augur, [sic] a 30-foot-long lift device" by truck 35 miles to another location, but was commanded by a voice in his head not to do so. His manager told him he was "mentally sick", and he was committed to Bloomfield Mental Hospital for four months. After his release he moved first to England where he worked at a hospital in Middlesex, and then to Israel where he arrived by ship in March 1969. He volunteered at Mishmar Hasharon kibbutz in the Sharon Valley between Haifa and Tel Aviv where he stayed a few months. According to kibbutzniks, one night they were startled by wild shouts from Rohan; when one volunteer attempted to calm him, Rohan told them he thought that perhaps he was Jewish. He spoke to an American theology student and volunteer of "the imminence of the Messiah's coming and the construction of a new temple".

Denis Michael Rohan (born 1 July 1941) is an Australian arsonist responsible for the Al-Aqsa mosque fire, which took place in Jerusalem on 21 August 1969.