Australia lays out case against Indian doctor (Roundup)

Jul 31, 2007, 11:23 GMT

Sydney - An Indian doctor who left Australia last week after a terrorism charge against him was dropped may have had foreknowledge of the failed bomb attacks in Britain and certainly left his job at a Brisbane hospital on the pretext that his wife had given birth, officials said Tuesday.

Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews told reporters in Canberra that the transcript of an online chat-room conversation that Haneef had with his brother, Shoab, in Bangalore on the day prior to Haneef's attempted departure from Brisbane suggested he had advance knowledge of the botched car bombings in London and Glasgow.

Andrews revealed the details of the police investigation to defend his controversial decision to revoke Haneef's visa despite a court granting him bail on a charge that was eventually dropped.

The 27-year-old was arrested at Brisbane airport July 2 while waiting with a one-way ticket for a flight to India. He was held for almost a month under Australia's new anti-terrorism laws and charged with providing support for terrorism.

Police initially alleged he had supplied a mobile phone SIM card to the group behind the failed bombings and that it had been found in a blazing Jeep that his cousin Kafeel Ahmed is alleged to have rammed into Glasgow airport. They subsequently retracted that allegation, saying the SIM card was found with Kafeel Ahmed's brother Sabeel in a house in Liverpool, some 300 kilometres away.

The location of the SIM card was one of two mistakes admitted to by the public prosecutor and which led to the criminal case against Haneef collapsing. The other mistake was where Haneef had lived in Britain before arriving in Australia in September last year.

Andrews said that Haneef had not asked for emergency leave to see his wife and newborn daughter when he arrived for work on the morning of July 2. He only applied in the afternoon after receiving two telephone calls, one from India, in which he was told there was an issue with a SIM card.

'The whole circumstances surrounding Haneef's attempted hasty departure from Australia, including chat-room conversations, when viewed against his clear prior association with the Ahmed brothers, led me to form a reasonable suspicion as required by the migration legislation,' Andrews said.

'I received information from the Australian Federal Police regarding Dr Haneef and I cancelled his visa in the national interest based on that advice.'

Peter Russo, Haneef's lawyer, told Australia's AAP news agency that his client was questioned over the chat-room conversation and he clarified it to police.

'You can put any interpretation you like on it, but I tell you now, it has been explained in his second record of interview,' Russo said in a telephone interview from Bangalore.

Russo accompanied Haneef on the flight to India and is preparing a legal appeal to the revocation of his visa.