THE conviction this week in London of an Iraqi-born doctor on terrorism charges brings Australians a step closer to learning the truth about the treatment meted out last year to the Gold Coast doctor Mohamed Haneef by the Howard government and the Australian Federal Police.
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After the discovery of two car bombs in London and a failed suicide attack on Glasgow Airport in June last year, Dr Bilal Abdullah and Dr Mohammed Asha were charged with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Dr Haneef was apprehended trying to fly out of Australia a couple of days later and was charged with recklessly aiding the terrorist cell.
These attempted bombings caused an international sensation. Apparently a terrorist cell of doctors had been uncovered. Men pledged to heal were planning, in the words of the London prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, "murder on an indiscriminate and a wholesale scale".
But the network of killer doctors has turned out to be an illusion. Last night in London, Iraqi-born Abdullah, convicted after an 11-week trial, was sentenced to 32 years in jail.
Dr Asha, a brilliant Jordanian neurologist and the supposed mastermind of the operation, was acquitted by the same court.
Charges against Dr Haneef were dropped last year and, after an $8 million investigation involving hundreds of officers, the Australian Federal Police announced in August this year that he was no longer a person of interest. The inquiry into the Haneef case by the retired NSW Supreme Court judge John Clarke, QC, was already under way. Though Mr Clarke's report was delivered to the Federal Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, in November, it has been delayed until the conclusion of the London trial.
The evidence against Abdullah, a British-born Iraqi, was unanswerable: he was caught by security cameras leaving a car loaded with gas canisters, detonators and nails outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in the West End of London. A day later he was arrested as he leapt from a blazing Jeep Cherokee at Glasgow Airport.
But the evidence against Dr Asha, a Jordanian, was weak: close friendships, a series of meetings, the gift of a few thousand dollars, and jihadist documents found on his laptop. Dr Asha claimed to have known nothing beforehand of the raids and to have been betrayed by his "reckless" friend Abdullah.
Dr Asha is to be deported to Jordan. Dr Haneef was not called as a witness at the trial.
Defending their handling of the Haneef case, senior AFP officers speak of the British attempted bombings as an al-Qaeda operation. According to senior police sources, there was a fear that a cohort of foreign doctors, perhaps answering to al-Qaeda, may have been put in place in Australia using false CVs.
But British authorities are not claiming any direct link between the botched bombings and the world's most feared terrorist organisation. Speaking after the jury's verdict this week, the head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism unit, Deputy Assistant Commissioner John McDowall, said the British bombers were self-starters with little or no contact with overseas commanders and had been merely inspired by al-Qaeda. "This was a group that was largely self-motivated, came up with the ideas themselves, tutored themselves through the internet. I don't think they received significant training elsewhere."
That they were so inept saved hundreds of lives.
The Clarke report could be released as early as today.
