Nine men who allegedly stockpiled bomb-making chemicals and vowed to avenge perceived injustices against Muslims were ordered to stand trial for Australia's largest terrorist conspiracy, court officials said yesterday.
Magistrate Michael Price, after hearing evidence gathered in a monthslong police operation, ruled it was strong enough to be heard by a Supreme Court jury and referred the case to the higher court on June 1, said an official at Penrith Local Court, who declined to be named in line with policy.
The nine men are charged with conspiring between June 2004 and November 2005 to carry out a terrorist act. None of the suspects, who face a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted, entered a plea, but their lawyers have said they maintain they are innocent.
Prosecutors said at the pretrial hearing that the nine suspects bought unrestricted chemicals that can be used in making explosives, and downloaded from the Internet instructions that included how to mix the cocktail of agents used to make the bombs used in the deadly 2005 London subway attacks.
The prosecutors allege the nine were devotees of a radical Muslim cleric sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, and struck a pact to launch a terrorist attack because they felt their religion was under attack.
No planned target has been revealed, but police alleged the suspects had Australia's only nuclear reactor, a small facility used to make radioactive medical supplies, under surveillance.
They were arrested in a series of 2005 raids in Sydney and the southern city of Melbourne, where cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika and other followers were also detained and now face separate charges of belonging to a terrorist group.
Separately yesterday, two Melbourne men were arrested Tuesday for raising money for Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels, allegedly deceiving donors by saying they were collecting funds for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, police said.
The two men, aged 32 and 36 but not further identified, were arrested in raids in the southern city of Melbourne after a two-year investigation by Australian Federal Police and officers from Victoria state. They face up to 25 years in prison.
There was no evidence the men were planning any attack in Australia, but that they were helping the Sri Lankan rebel group, known as Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and listed as a terrorist group in Australia, said Frank Prendergast, a senior federal counterterrorism officer.
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