A two-day extension granted to Australian police to hold a suspect in the London and Scotland terror plot may not be enough time to sift through a mountain of potential evidence, officials said yesterday.
Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said investigators may again invoke counterterrorism laws and ask a magistrate for permission to detain Muhammad Haneef longer, as they cross-check information gathered in a series of raids across Australia with evidence from Britain.
Haneef, a 27-year-old Indian who came to Australia from Britain last year, has been in custody without charge since July 2 when he was arrested as he tried to leave Australia for India with a one-way ticket.
His lawyer, Peter Russo, said his client was being denied natural justice and demanded he be charged or released.
A magistrate on Monday granted police two more days to hold Haneef while they conducted their investigation, but turned down their request for five days.
"We asked for a period of time that we thought was reasonable in terms of the amount of work that we envisaged needs to be done before we can be in a position to decide one way or the other about Dr Haneef's fate," Keelty told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio yesterday.
"If it's required ... we'll go back to the magistrate" and ask for more time, he said.
Up to 230 federal and state police have been involved in the investigation in Australia, which has included a number of raids on Haneef's apartment in Queensland state, two hospitals in Western Australia state and interviews in three states, Keelty said.
He said it was one of the largest counterterrorism probes in Australia, and complex because of the large amount of potential evidence in Australia and Britain, and the difference in time zones.
Attorney General Philip Ruddock said the investigation must be thorough.
"Something in the order of 120 gigabytes of computer data is being examined -- that's the equivalent of 31,000 single page documents. It's one of the reasons the matter takes so long," he said.
Police are checking financial, mobile phone and other records for possible links between Haneef and the plot in which two car bombs were found on June 29 in London and a vehicle attack on the international airport in Glasgow, Scotland, the following day.
An Australian federal police agent has gone to India to continue the investigation, a spokeswoman for the Australian Federal Police said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with policy.
Haneef's family in India says he is related to at least one of the seven suspects being held in Britain, but that he is innocent. Haneef was rushing to leave Australia to join his wife who recently had a baby in India, they said.
Keelty said the large amount of information gathered did not mean Haneef was guilty.
"We have to ... discern whether what we have here is evidence or information," he said. "There's a big difference between the two."
Russo said the law under which Haneef is being held is unfair.
"I don't think that there's any balance been built into it," Russo told reporters. "It impacts on a person's whole livelihood. Say, for example, a person is detained for a month. What happens to their job?"
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS