Australian Police Dismiss Terror Charge Reports – Story Changes

The Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has taken the unusual step of publicly dismissing media reports claiming that Dr Mohamed Haneef, recently arrested on terrorism charges, was plotting to blow up a landmark building on Australia’s Gold Coast tourist strip and had been taking piloting lessons.

Reports in two News Ltd newspapers in Australia – the Sunday Mail and the Herald Sun – claimed that the AFP had downloaded 31,000 pages of documents from Dr Haneef’s computer which included photographs of a landmark Gold Coast building and its foundations, as well as evidence that Dr Haneef was among a group of doctors who had been learning to fly in Queensland.

However, AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty said today that there is no truth to the reports, and the information had not come from the AFP. “There has been significant misreporting on many aspects of this case,” he said in a statement.

The Commissioner’s dismissal of the sensational reports came after Queensland Premier Peter Beattie threw down the gauntlet and said the case was becoming farcical. “I have to say I was quite angry when I read the story this morning sourced from the Federal Police,” he said. “I turn on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and the Federal Police are refusing to confirm whether the story is true or not. For heaven’s sake, this is starting to look like the keystone cops, to be frank, and I think Queenslanders are entitled to know. People have got a right to know – this is not some game. If there is seriously some sort of threat, then let’s see the photos, let’s release them. The lawyers said that they’ve never heard this before. I just think we are being treated like mugs and I don’t think that’s good enough.”

Yet Mr Keelty defended the AFP’s earlier silence. He said, “It is neither practical, nor the role of the AFP, to correct every wrong assertion or piece of speculation that has been put forward. We will be taking the extraordinary step of contacting Dr Haneef’s lawyer to correct the record.”

Dr Haneef, a 27 year-old Indian-trained doctor, was arrested at Brisbane International Airport in Queensland on July 2, after British police investigating the attempted bombings in London and Glasgow tipped off Australian authorities that Dr Haneef was a suspect in the UK terror plots.

Police prosecutors in Queensland initially claimed that Dr Haneef’s mobile phone SIM card had been found in a burning jeep at Glasgow Airport, but have since conceded that that was not the case. The SIM card was found on Dr Haneef’s second cousin, Sabeel Ahmed, 26, who has been charged in Britain with failing to disclose information that could have prevented a terror attack.

Dr Haneef now stands charged of “recklessly supporting terrorism” by providing his second cousin with his SIM card before leaving Britain for Australia in July 2006. As he awaits trial, he has not entered a plea, has had his Australian visa cancelled and remains in an immigration detention center despite an earlier magistrate’s ruling that granted him release on bail.

Kafeel Ahmed, another second cousin of Dr Haneef, remains under police guard in the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Scotland, after crashing a flaming jeep into the Glasgow Airport main terminal on June 30 and then setting himself ablaze.

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This article was first published at BayouBuzz.com

Terrorist Doctors In Britain, Australia

As investigations continue into the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow on Friday and Saturday, news that several doctors are among the nine suspects has stunned medical professionals in Britain and Australia.

Staff at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, Scotland were horrified to learn that one of the hospital’s doctors was arrested at Glasgow Airport on Saturday afternoon after a Jeep in which he was a passenger ploughed into the entrance of the airport’s main terminal and was then set alight, causing a series of explosions.

Dr Bilal Talal Samad Abdullah, a diabetes specialist at the hospital, gained his medical qualifications in Baghdad in 2004 and registered to work as a doctor in the UK in 2006. He lived in Houston, a small village near Glasgow, and was described as a “devout Muslim” by fellow hospital staff.

“I suppose the idea that there might be somebody amongst us who would perpetrate an act like this is certainly pretty alarming,” said Dr Murray Stewart of the Royal Alexandra Hospital.

Meanwhile, police have conducted a number of controlled explosions on a suspicious vehicle parked outside the hospital, where the driver of the Jeep is being treated for serious burns to 90 percent of his body.  He has not yet been identified and remains in critical condition, under armed police guard.

The two men are also suspected of setting up the failed car bombings in central London on Friday.

The would-be London bombers tried to set off explosives in two Mercedes parked in the London night-life district by ringing mobile phones left in the cars. When the explosives – gasoline filled containers, gas cylinders and propane tanks – failed to detonate, the phones were left intact and their call histories used to lead police to a number of suspects including Dr Mohammed Jamil Abdelkader Asha.

Dr Asha, 26, was arrested on the M6 motorway in Cheshire on Saturday evening. He was born in Saudi Arabia into a Palestinian family who migrated to Jordan in 1991. He attended the Jubilee School for gifted children in Amman and later scored the third highest grade on his university entrance exam for medicine at the University of Jordan, where he graduated in 2004. The vice-dean of the university described him as a “top scholar”.

Dr Asha served his post-qualification internship in neurology at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford in the UK. Before his arrest, he worked as a neurologist at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke-on-Trent and lived with his wife and 2 year-old son in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Dr Asha’s wife, Marwah Dana Asha, was arrested with him on Saturday evening. She also attended Jubilee School in Amman, where she met Dr Asha, and later trained as a laboratory researcher at the University of Science and Technology in northern Jordan. 

Following a tip-off from British investigators, Dr Mohammed Haneef, 27, was arrested in Australia on Monday night at Brisbane Airport, 370 miles north of Sydney. He is believed to be an Indian national who worked at Halton Hospital in Cheshire, England before he began working in Australia at the Gold Coast Hospital in Queensland in 2006. His colleagues at the Gold Coast Hospital described him as “a model citizen with excellent references”. Dr Haneef was about to board a plane to India on a one-way ticket when he was arrested on Monday.

Another doctor believed to be a foreign national is also being questioned by federal police in Australia. He has not yet been identified.

“At this point, there is no suggestion in relation to the second doctor,” said Queensland Premier Peter Beattie. “We do not know of any link the second doctor may have had with anyone.”

Three remaining suspects currently in British police custody have not yet been identified. One is a 26 year-old doctor from India who was arrested in Liverpool on Saturday night. There are reports that he may have been arrested by mistake, after police confused him with Dr Haneef in Australia.

The other two remaining suspects, who are 25 and 28 years of age, are believed to be medical students at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, Scotland.

Medical authorities in the UK and Australia have moved quickly to condemn the involvement of doctors in any terrorist activities.

“The first rule of the Hippocratic oath is just do no harm,” said Edwin Borman, chairman of the international committee of the British Medical Association. “Clearly the involvement of any medical professional in anything that goes beyond that would be a betrayal not only of society but of their own profession.”

Dr Ross Cartmill, president of the Queensland Australian Medical Association, said: “Terrorist activities can occur anywhere and by anybody. But if doctors are involved, then clearly I express my disappointment. Certainly it’s not what you expect of doctors.”

Although police have not confirmed that there is clear evidence to link the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow to al Qaeda, some terrorism experts say that the recruitment of professionals is one of the organization’s known tactics.

Sajjan Gohel, Director of International Security for the London-based Asia-Pacific Foundation, a counter-terrorism think tank, said: “Al Qaeda wants to pick up individuals that are well educated, that have the Western social skills, and the ability to blend into the civilian fabric of society because then it gives them an easier chance to orchestrate the mass casualty attack.”

With the UK still on ‘critical’ alert, Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke said that police will soon identify the terrorist cell that tried to carry out the bombings, as well as their methods and any links they have to other groups.

“It is no exaggeration to say that new information is coming to light hour by hour,” he said. “I am confident – absolutely confident – that in the coming days and weeks we will be able to gain a thorough understanding of the methods used by the terrorists, of the way in which they planned their attacks, and of the network to which they belong.”

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This article was first published at BayouBuzz.com

UK Terror Means Critical Security Threats

 

The UK is bracing itself for a fresh wave of terrorist attacks following three attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow on Friday and Saturday.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who took office on Wednesday, said in a national televised address on Sunday that “it is clear that we are dealing with people who are associated with al Qaeda.”

Security authorities have long feared that the deadly car bombings which have become daily occurrences in Iraq would spread to European cities.

Late Saturday, the new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, raised the national terror threat to the highest level – ‘critical’ – which indicates that an attack is expected ‘imminently’.

“This weekend’s bomb attacks signal a major escalation in the war being waged on us by Islamic terrorists,” said Lord Stevens, London’s former police chief and a terrorism adviser appointed earlier this week by Mr Brown. “Now al Qaeda has imported the tactics of Baghdad and Bali to the streets of the UK,” he wrote in an opinion piece published in Sunday’s News of the World.

British authorities said evidence indicated that the attack on Glasgow Airport, in which two men rammed a flaming Jeep into the entrance of the main terminal, had been a botched suicide mission.

One witness, Scott Leeson, said: “The car came speeding past. Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight in to the door. He must have been trying to smash straight through.”

Some witnesses reported that the driver got jammed between concrete security bollards as he tried to plough into the terminal, which was bustling with families waiting to check in for flights on the first day of school holidays.

“They were obviously trying to get it further inside the airport as the wheels were spinning and smoke was coming from them,” said another witness, Lynsey McBean.

The driver then got out and poured gasoline over himself and the vehicle and lit them both, setting off a series of explosions.

“It was just a small fire at first,” said Robin Patterson. “Then there was an enormous explosion. The guy next to the car, his skin and clothes just fell off him.”

Engulfed in flames, the burning man threw punches at passengers and police and shouted “Allah! Allah!” as he tried to escape. He was restrained by police, who put out the flames with a fire extinguisher. Both the driver and his passenger were led away by police in handcuffs.

The driver was then taken to a local hospital to receive treatment. There, staff found on him a ‘suspect device’ believed to be a suicide belt, forcing the evacuation of the hospital. However, this proved to be a false alarm.

Five bystanders were also injured in the Glasgow Airport attack , none seriously.  On Sunday morning, the airport resumed flights, with passengers entering the terminal through a police cordon.

Glasgow police chief Willie Rae said Saturday’s airport attack and Friday’s attempted car bombings in London appear to have been connected. “There are clearly similarities and we can confirm that this is being treated as a terrorist incident,” he said.

Police discovered two Mercedes in central London in the early hours of Friday morning, each packed with gasoline-filled containers, gas cylinders, propane tanks and nails.

One car was parked outside the popular Tiger Tiger nightclub on Haymarket in London’s West End, a busy thoroughfare lined with clubs, theatres and restaurants and only a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. An ambulance driver treating one of the nightclub’s patrons for a head wound noticed vapors coming from the car and alerted police, who defused the explosives. The other car had been parked illegally on a nearby street and was towed away.

Police now believe that the bombers intended to use one explosion to draw panicking club patrons out on to the streets; then a second car bomb could have been detonated in the crowd to cause hundreds of deaths. This was the tactic used in the October 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people.

Chris Driver-Williams, a retired British army major and now a terrorist bomb consultant to the US and British governments, told the Washington Post that the explosive firepower of the crude devices could have been “catastrophic”, especially since the valves on the gas cylinders were left open to create a fuel-air explosion.

This type of explosion uses oxygen to ignite a blast wave more powerful than many conventional explosives. However, these devices are difficult to ignite properly and could explain the flames coming from the Jeep even before its crash into the airport terminal in Glasgow.

Nevertheless, Mr Driver-Williams said that if such explosives were ignited properly, the result would be a “fireball the size of a house”.

The bombs assembled for the attempted London car bombings may reflect the increased restrictions on high-powered explosive materials in the UK.

“The danger here is that we are entering the era of the car bomb,” an unnamed  British intelligence source told The Independent. “In the past, al Qaeda-style terrorists have used high-explosive bombs aimed at symbolic, high-profile targets. But it’s easy to make a gas and nail car bomb without raising suspicion.”

Magnus Ranstorp, a Swedish terrorism expert has also said that the threat to the UK is the gravest in Europe because the UK is considered a close ally of the US and a major military partner in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

It is not known yet whether the car bombers in London and Glasgow were assisted or funded by overseas terrorist organizations. Yet they are believed to be members of a loose network of terrorist cells that use the Internet to exchange information on the latest terror tactics.

Police have begun investigating the al Hesbah chat forum, which is frequently used by al Qaeda supporters. One message posted by frequent contributor Abu Osama al-Hazeen stated that “London shall be bombed” hours before the first car bomb was found in Haymarket. Police are trying to locate Mr al-Hazeen by following his ‘electronic footprint’.

Police are also using more conventional means to track down those involved, including forensic testing and security camera video footage. While the two Mercedes used were probably stolen, police have obtained a fairly clear CCTV image of one suspect who ran from the Mercedes in Haymarket at 1.30am on Friday. Investigators are now tracking his further movements using images taken by hundreds of cameras throughout central London. Police believe it is highly unlikely that those involved have tried to leave the country.

Five suspects have been arrested so far in connection with the incidents in Glasgow and London. In addition to the two men taken into custody at Glasgow Airport, police arrested two other suspects early Sunday on a major highway in Cheshire, northern England. A fifth suspect was arrested in Liverpool, where John Lennon Airport was closed overnight following the discovery of another suspicious vehicle. The airport has since reopened.

The UK’s new terror threat comes one week before the anniversary of the bombings which shook London on July 7, 2005. Just before 9 am that morning, three bombs exploded within fifty seconds of each other on Underground commuter trains; nearly an hour later, another bomb exploded on a double-decker bus. Fifty-two people were killed in the blasts, with more than 700 injured. It was later discovered that the bombings had been carried out by home-grown British Muslim extremists based in Birmingham.

British authorities have now ordered that security be tightened around the Wimbledon tennis tournament and Sunday’s concert honoring the late Princess Diana, which is expected to attract a crowd of 60,000 to London’s Wembley Stadium.

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This article was first published at BayouBuzz.com