The judge in a trial of five Muslim men accused of plotting a terrorist attack in Australia cautioned jurors yesterday that Islam was not on trial and urged them to put aside any bias.
Prosecutors have said the suspects were devotees of a radical cleric sympathetic to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and that they made a pact to launch a terrorist attack because they felt their religion was under threat. The men have pleaded not guilty.
New South Wales state Supreme Court judge Justice Anthony Whealy asked the 15 jurors to put aside any prejudice, noting that the public has been bombarded with media coverage of radical Islam and its links to terrorism in the last few years.
“You must be strict to bring to bear absolute impartiality,” Whealy told them as the trial opened today. “It would be wrong for you to assume ... the guilt or innocence of the accused simply because of your views on the way the Muslim lifestyle is dealt with in the media.”
“It’s an obvious truism for me to tell you that the Muslim religion is not on trial here,” he said.
The suspects, who were arrested in a series of raids in 2005, have pleaded not guilty to conspiring to commit acts in preparation for a terrorist attack. They each potentially face life in prison if convicted.
Prosecutors have alleged the men downloaded bomb-making instructions off the Internet and stockpiled chemicals to make lethal explosives.
Their trial is expected to last up to one year.
The five Muslim extremists planned terrorist acts in Australia in pursuit of “violent jihad,” the court heard as their trial began.
The Sydney men obtained or sought weapons and explosive materials and possessed extremist material venerating the work of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, prosecutor Richard Maidment told a Supreme Court jury.
He said the evidence would show the men were working together between July 2004 and their arrest in November 2005 “to prepare for the commission of one or more terrorist acts in Australia.”
The accused — Khaled Cheikho, Moustafa Cheikho, Mohamed Ali Elomar, Abdul Rakib Hasan and Mohammed Omar Jamal — have pleaded not guilty.
If convicted, the men — aged from 24 to 43 — face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Raids on their homes found “large quantities of literature which supported indiscriminate killing, mass murder and martyrdom in pursuit of violent jihad,” Maidment said.
They had pictures and videos showing the hijacked aircraft smashing into the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as beheadings and death on the battlefield, he said.
Maidment described all five as devout Muslims who believed Islam was under attack throughout the world and that there was a religious obligation to come to its defense.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS