KEY POINTS:
SYDNEY - A lawyer for the youngest of five men accused of hatching a terrorist plot says there's a "gap as wide as Sydney Heads" between the evidence and alleged jihadist intentions inferred by the Crown.
Greg Scragg told the NSW Supreme Court at the start of the
trial yesterday that his client Mohamed Omar Jamal was just a young Australian who loved computers and was looking for a wife.
Jamal, 24, is one of five Sydney men standing trial for conspiring to commit acts in preparation for a terrorist act.
He and at least eight other men are accused of plotting an attack in Australia involving explosives and firearms, between July 2004 and November 2005.
Opening his case for Jamal, Scragg downplayed his client's alleged involvement in the conspiracy.
He told the jury that Jamal, then 21, had been arrested in December 2005 at the height of anti-Muslim sentiment following the Cronulla riot.
"If you are a Muslim, if you are young, if you are wearing a beard, if you perhaps pray in public, you are viewed with a mixture of fear, suspicion and as a terrorist sympathiser," Scragg said of the sentiment prevailing at the time.
The evidence would show that rather than being a jihadist, Jamal was simply a "young man interested in computers".
"He can't find a wife, he's living at home, he's driving a clapped-out Toyota Corona," Scragg said.
Echoing the submissions of counsel for the other accused men, Scragg said there would be no proof of how much, if any, of the extremist material recovered from various group members Jamal had read.
"He's certainly not a scholar," Scragg said. "He's certainly not the sort of young man who's going to spend hours and hours poring through all this material."
Scragg said listening devices and surveillance material would show no evidence of extremist views held by Jamal, who on one occasion would be heard defending the former Prime Minister John Howard.
"There's a gap as wide as Sydney Heads between people of Muslim faith ... sympathising with insurgency movements in faraway lands ... and forming an intention to do acts in preparation for a terrorist act here in Australia," he said.
They are as different as night and day."
CONSPIRACY CLAIMS
* Khaled Cheikho, Moustafa Cheikho, Mohamed Elomar, Abdul Rakib Hasan and Mohamed Omar Jamal are on trial in the NSW Supreme Court, charged with conspiring to commit an act or acts in preparation for a terrorist act. All have pleaded not guilty.
* Aged between 24 and 43, they are all devout Muslims.
* The Crown alleges they had gathered significant amounts of extremist material, ammunition and tried to procure large amounts of chemicals in a plot to carry out an attack.
* The Crown claims they were motivated by Australia's involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
* The court has been told the men entered a conspiracy between July 2004 and July 2005 with at least four other men and they allegedly went on bush training camps in preparation for waging violent jihad.
- AAP
