stalking terror
THEY call them 24/7s. In police and intelligence terms they are the kingpins, men whose every movement is watched, recorded and analysed all day, every day.
At least five Sydney residents have received this round-the-clock attention since just before the 2000 Olympics. They are thought to be pressure points in the internecine world of Australian radical Islam: devotees who can rally followers to rise up in the name of jihad or keep a lid on those at odds with the ways of the West.
For the past 10 months, police and ASIO officers feared two of these five Sydney men had opted for menace over conciliation, inciting Islamists in Melbourne to consider terror attacks against national landmarks.
Their suspicion culminated in ASIO raids across Melbourne last Wednesday and again on Tuesday, when the spooks also came knocking on at least three Sydney front doors.
The Sydney men they shook down are well known to the intelligence and law enforcement community. The pair are the key to the latest ASIO sweep, potentially the most significant of the four rounds of raids launched since the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
One man in his early 30s is believed to have trained with outlawed terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba in Afghanistan in late 2001, six months before amended anti-terrorism laws made it illegal to do so. He was recognised at an LET camp by terrorist turned informant Yong Ki Kwon, who referred to him by his alleged alias, Abu Asad, in the committal hearing of Sydney man Faheem Khalid Lodhi, who is awaiting Supreme Court trial in Sydney on terrorism charges.
The other man has links to a property in the NSW southern tablelands that was the subject of a security scare on the eve of the Sydney Olympics, when neighbours told police they had heard sustained automatic gunfire on the land.
Members of the radical Islamic Youth Movement later revealed they had been there at the time, but claimed they fired weapons only during hunting trips.
This was the first time the surnames of two of the men had come to light, although one of the pair was then too young to be considered a threat. In the years since, whenever extremist Islam has raised its head in Australia, at least one of these men has invariably been linked.
And so it was when one of them was seen in a small boat on Sydney Harbour in the weeks before New Year's Eve in 2003 in the company of another man, Saleh Jamal, who had been freed on bail after two years in prison awaiting trial for allegedly helping shoot up the Lakemba Police Station in Sydney's southwestern suburbs in 1998.
For weeks before the festivities, the older of the two was in constant contact with Jamal, who had spent two years in prison awaiting trial. Jamal had become radicalised during his time in prison and took his new-found fervour for militant Islam to his mates after his release.
He had a willing audience. From the moment he left prison, Jamal became one of the 24/7s. He quickly established links with like-minded radicals and tried to recruit more to his cause. He was by then an ardent follower of the Wahabi strand of Islam, a hardline group that interpreted the term jihad in its literal sense: to violently oppose anything that clashed with the traditional teachings of the prophet Mohammed. This included the secular ways of Australian society.
While police watched in the weeks before New Year's Eve, Jamal and his friends took to Sydney Harbour in one of two small boats, surveying an oil refinery and the Walsh Bay wharf, near the city's most famous landmarks. Shortly after returning to shore they received their first knock on the door from counter-terrorism police who wanted to make their presence felt.
"We also put one of their boats out of business," says one source. "They needed to know we knew what they were up to and would do what we could to disrupt them."
Amid the biggest police and spook operation mounted onshore, the new year turned over without incident. But precedents had been set, both by the suspected extremists and those charged to catch them.
In August last year, a man walked into a police station in suburban Melbourne with information that would prove to be crucial. He told police a group of Muslim men he knew were talking about potentially plotting an attack within Australia. The men were linked to Melbourne's most radical mosque in the inner suburb of East Brunswick, where Muslims flocked to hear the firebrand political and religious sermons of Sheik Mohammed Omran, leader of the radical Ahl Sunnah Wal Jammah in Australia.
Surveillance was quickly put in place on a small group. For a time, police and ASIO sat back and watched.
In the months to follow another piece of information came in, this time from a caller to the Howard Government's anti-terrorism hotline. The caller said he had seen someone using a video camera to take footage of the Stock Exchange building in downtown Melbourne. Further checks revealed the man had also shot footage of two main city train stations. About the same time, another piece of intelligence came in. The Melbourne group was about to receive visitors from the Harbour City.
With police watching, the Sydney pair drove south to meet with members of the Brunswick Mosque. What happened after they arrived is still the source of speculation. Clearly aware of the chance that they were being watched or listened to, the Sydney pair avoided conversations on the phone or indoors. They preferred to do their talking in public places, parklands being a favourite spot.
It was at this point late last year that police seriously considered moving on the group. They knew there were at least 60 men in Australia who had done paramilitary training with LET or al-Qa'ida. And they had begun to see some of the results of that training on show. "They were acutely surveillance conscious," one source says. "It was very hard to keep tabs on them."
Just as hard was deciding what to do next. At face value, the men being watched had not committed a criminal offence. But this was set against the reality that there are people in Australia who continue to support terror groups in many ways. British domestic security service MI5 said in a synopsis released this year -- and directly relevant to Australia -- "Some ... terrorists have received military and specialist terrorist training in camps overseas, for example in Afghanistan. Relationships forged in these training camps form the basis of loose networks of terrorists who can operate outside structured organisations. These networks operate covertly, using clandestine methods to communicate and shield their activities from scrutiny, which makes gathering intelligence on their activities more difficult."
Knowing that one of the Sydney men had links to LET and that some of the Melbourne group had shown a sudden liking for roughing it in the bush, the spooks decided to move.
Just as it was in Sydney, the knocks on the door would be part of a disruption strategy, not necessarily a precursor for arrest.
Under fire this week that the ASIO-led raids amounted to a witch-hunt against Muslims, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said: "I can assure you of this, that issues they are addressing are the ones of utmost seriousness. They don't have time or resources to be playing silly games in these matters."
Just how ugly things can turn when any of the police or security agencies turn away -- even for a moment -- was hammered home early last year when Jamal, despite being on Supreme Court bail, was arrested in Lebanon on terrorism offences. He was found to have fled Australia using the passport of a friend who resembled him. Late last year Jamal was found guilty of plotting attacks within Lebanon and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Authorities hope intensive questioning of the Melbourne and Sydney groups in the months to come will shed light on whether they were merely talking like terrorists or planning something.
Since the rise of radical Islam in Southeast Asia and Australia five years ago, there has been a prevailing view that no one within these shores would launch an attack for fear of damnation from within the Islamic fraternity.
"We've always believed that they would have to import someone to do it," says one security source. "They have it too good here and they know it. Just what is shaken out of this latest activity is going to be very interesting, though. Perhaps the game has changed."
