Hydrablog

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/world/asia/04australia.html
August 4, 2009
Australia Police Hold 4 in Terror Plot
By MERAIAH FOLEY [Australia] [global jihadis] [apparent links to Somalia] [al Qaeda types?] [global jihadis hydra] [use psci469b] [*]
SYDNEY — Four men suspected of having links to a radial Islamic group from Somalia were arrested Tuesday for what authorities alleged was a plot to storm a military base in the Sydney suburbs and shoot as many soldiers as possible. [*]

The men, all Australian citizens of Somali and Lebanese descent, were detained when hundreds of police officers swept through 19 homes in Melbourne [sounds as though they had good intelligence] [*] early Tuesday. The raids were the culmination of a seven-month investigation involving state and federal officials and the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization, the government’s spy agency. [*]

Police said the men, whose ages range from 22 to 26, planned to arm themselves with automatic weapons and stage a guerrilla attack on Holsworthy Barracks, a sprawling military complex [*]set in the scrub lands southwest of Sydney.

“This operation has disrupted an alleged terrorist attack that could have claimed many lives,” the acting federal police commissioner, Tony Negus, told reporters in Melbourne. He said the men “were prepared to inflict a sustained attack on military personnel until they themselves were killed.” [plan was suicide mo] [*]

Officials say the suspects were affiliated with Al Shabab, an Islamic organization that controls much of southern Somalia and has been waging an insurgency against the country’s fragile, [it’s hard to say how firm but links with al Qaeda have been made previously] [*] Western-backed transitional government. The United States considers the group a terrorist organization, claiming it harbors Al Qaeda operatives wanted for orchestrating the 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Police charged one of the men, 25-year-old Nayef El Sayed, with conspiring to plan or prepare for a terrorist attack. Mr. Sayed did not enter a plea or apply for bail when he appeared briefly before the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Tuesday, but refused to stand up when the judge entered the chambers because, his lawyer told the court, his religious beliefs prevented him from standing before anyone but God, [*]according to local reporters who attended the hearing.

The magistrate gave the police an eight-hour extension to continue questioning another man, Saney Aweys, into Tuesday night. He and two other suspects have not been charged. Mr. Aweys, who declined legal representation, told the court that he did not know the other three men. [*]

But prosecutors said that federal police had intercepted numerous telephone conversations and text messages referring to the planned attack. The authorities said they plan to use these telephone intercepts and video footage of one of the men allegedly arriving at the Holsworthy base on Mar. 28, [*]as evidence.

The police said at least one of the men had traveled to Somalia to participate in the insurgency, and members of the group were trying to persuade Islamic leaders to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, supporting the planned attack. [the fellow(s) who traveled to Somalia and back is lucky to be alive] [*]

If the allegations are true, the men join the ranks of Somali expatriates and Muslim youths who have been drawn to Al Shabab, which means “youth” in Arabic. Officials in the United States have also been investigating whether a group of young men from Minnesota were recruited by the group to join the influx of foreign militants fighting against Somalia’s transitional government.

Clive Williams, a terrorism expert at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center of the Australian National University, said the added scrutiny on Al Shabab has made it harder for sympathetic Muslim youths to travel to Somalia unnoticed, making conditions ripe for Shabab-inspired attacks elsewhere. [*]

“Now that it has become more difficult to go there, the alternative is to go somewhere else, or do something in your home country,” said Mr. Williams. “Given that Australia’s foreign policy is closely aligned with that of the United States in many areas, particularly in relation to Afghanistan, it would make sense to wage an attack Australia to protest against Australia’s policies.” [and we’ve read reports in past month or so that numbers of jihadis have fled AfPak and we’ve heard that Somalia actions have approximated brigands as much as jihadis so it does appear some disruptions involved] [*]

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the arrests offered a sobering reminder of the “enduring threat from terrorism at home, here in Australia, as well as overseas.”

Australia has not had a major attack on its territory in recent years.

However, a number of people are serving lengthy prison sentences for plots that have been uncovered since the government imposed tough anti-terror laws in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Dozens of Australians have been killed in attacks overseas, including three people who were killed in simultaneous suicide bomb attacks at two American hotels in Jakarta, [*]Indonesia, last month.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company