KEY POINTS:
Dr Mohammed Haneef may - or may not - be a member of the group of extremist doctors allegedly responsible for the bungled bombings in London and Glasgow last week.
But as he continues to be grilled in Queensland under an extended interrogation order, by Australian counter-terrorism agents
and a British Metropolitan Police chief inspector, the 27-year-old Gold Coast registrar has become a marker in the nation's fight against terror.
Australian authorities in Canberra knew of the identities and linkages of the alleged bombers almost as fast as the British uncovered them. Within hours of the discovery of two explosives-laden cars in London on Friday last week and the thwarted ramming of Glasgow airport the following day, they knew Haneef was a suspect working as a hospital registrar on the Gold Coast.
On Monday night, federal and state counter-terror police arrested Haneef in a joint operation at Brisbane Airport as the Indian-born doctor arrived to fly home via the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.
Shortly afterwards they took another doctor from Southport's Gold Coast Hospital into custody for questioning. Dr Mohammed Asif Ali, an associate of Haneef's in both the United Kingdom and Queensland, was later released without charge.
Haneef is reported to be the cousin of brothers Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed, two of the doctors allegedly involved in the British bomb plots. Kafeel Ahmed has been named as the driver of the Jeep Cherokee severely burned when the four-wheel-drive rammed the bollards of the Glasgow airport terminal.
This time, Britain was lucky. The nature of the terror cell caught authorities off guard, exposing weaknesses in their screening systems and confirming the disturbing rise of extremists not linked to known Islamic radicals..
These new militants are also well-educated professionals who enter terrorism as untrained amateurs, rather than the accepted norm of carefully-trained bombers drawn from the poor and uneducated.
"The problem is, if they get lucky once, a lot of people will die," said Australian National University terrorism expert Dr Michael McKinley. "So that basically means the security forces have to be lucky every time. That's a big ask."
But although luck and the bombers' incompetence saved Britain from another appalling toll of the innocent, it was the efficiency of Australia's anti-terror network that identified, located and arrested Haneef in Brisbane.
The ties between British and Australian security and intelligence agencies have long been close, formalised bilaterally over many decades and extended through the UKUSA agreement forged during the Cold War. This hugely sophisticated global intelligence system also includes New Zealand, the United States and Canada.
Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the US, the ties with Britain have been drawing tighter. In July 2005, they took another giant step with the formation of Operation Kinship in Canberra to help the British investigate the London terror bombings that killed 56 and injured more than 700.
Canberra drew together a team of Federal, New South Wales and Victorian counter-terrorism police and Transport Department security experts, working with Federal Police (AFP) agents in London and The Hague and integrated through the AFP's Transnational Crime Co-ordination Centre.
In addition to inquiries within Australia, a team of observers from federal and state police and transport agencies was sent to London, gaining new intelligence - including bomb-making ingredients and techniques - that was fed back to Canberra.
The AFP and the domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio), already had officers in London. Since the 2005 bombings the AFP has had an agent with Britain's Counter-Terrorism Command.
As the investigations into last week's bungled bombings unfolded, developments were relayed from London to Asio's National Threat Assessment Centre in Canberra. As soon as the suspected Gold Coast connection emerged, counter-terrorism police began their preparations in Brisbane.
The speed and reach of the response reflects the compounding sense of urgency. Until al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah emerged over the past decade, the handful of terrorist incidents since the 1978 Sydney Hilton bombing - in which three people died - were generally extensions of conflicts abroad.
Now Australia is a target for international terrorism. Former Asio director-general and now Ambassador to the US, Dennis Richardson, noted in a speech in Washington that since 9/11 more Australian civilians have been killed in terror attacks than Americans, British, French or Germans.
In each of the first six years of the century, he said, there was at least one aborted, disrupted or actual attack against Australian interests abroad, or in Australia itself. This includes the Bali bombings and the 2004 attack on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.
Within Australia, three people have been convicted of terrorism-related offences and a further 26 are awaiting trial, including the 21 alleged members of cells in Melbourne and Sydney that allegedly intended bombing government and other iconic targets such as the Sydney Opera House.
Extremist clerics also continue to radicalise Muslim youths. This week a Government-funded study reported as many as 3000 young Muslims have been influenced by hardliners and are at risk of crossing to militancy.
The international linkages are clear. Frenchman Willie Brigitte, now jailed in France, was associated with plots in Australia. Senior Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists have slipped in and out. Last week two Australians were charged with terrorism offences in Lebanon.
"[Counter-terrorism] demands a strategy that extends well beyond the work of national intelligence and law enforcement agencies working within a national context," Asio director-general Paul O'Sullivan said in a recent speech. "That is why agencies such as Asio cannot afford to be focused only on what is happening on our own shores."
Asio now has more than 260 "liaison relationships" in 113 countries; its budget has soared from A$142 million ($155 million) to A$233 million in the past three years, and staff numbers will rise from 1220 to about 1860 over the next four years.
Australia's wider response has been broad and hard, extending and deepening international security and intelligence networks, passing tough new laws at home, and creating a unified whole-of-government approach in a national counter-terrorism plan that embraces intelligence agencies, the military, federal and state police, transport, emergency and essential services, immigration, Customs and fisheries agencies and business groups.
At the core of counter-terrorism is intelligence that not only identifies and tracks threats, but also seeks to understand its motivation, nature and constant evolution.
O'Sullivan warns that terrorism is dynamic and difficult to predict, with no guarantees that attacks can be prevented. Al Qaeda, he says, marries ideological intensity with operational resilience and adaptability that has enabled it to survive global assault, and to turn technology to a learning and teaching programme that "pushes the horizon for violent extremism".
AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty told a counter-terrorism conference terrorists were now hitting softer targets, adopting new communications and finance technologies, using charities and legitimate businesses as fronts, and committing fraud and identify theft.
Close international co-operation has become essential. Australia works intimately with New Zealand - Asio helped set up the Security Intelligence Service - and traditional partners Britain, the US and Canada.
Australia, Britain and the US are also creating a new intelligence-sharing system that will take advantage of time differences to provide a seamless flow of data. Canberra and Washington have further signed a 10-year high-tech research and intelligence-swapping agreement to track and frustrate terrorism.
In Asia, Canberra has forged close links with Indonesia since the Bali bombings. The AFP has set up the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement to help boost regional counter-terrorism agencies, and has helped Indonesian police to find and arrest terror suspects - including the Bali bombers and, last month, the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah's military wing, Abu Dujanah.
The AFP also operates in the Philippines and is working with the Royal Thai Police to set up a bomb data centre in Bangkok.
Australia, like New Zealand, has also signed on to an Association of Southeast Asian Nations regional forum intelligence-sharing agreement, and is working through the 2004 Bali Counter-Terrorism Process to co-ordinate legal moves and improve intelligence sharing among 25 countries.
At home, information from abroad flows into the Threat Assessment Centre to join home-grown intelligence gathered by Asio and other federal and state agencies. Foreign suspects appear on watch lists for border officials; locals attract more intense attention.
The information-gathering system is vast. Security agencies and other government departments have developed open working relationships with ethnic and religious communities.
Radical militants and their associates are closely watched, mosques, radical bookshops and other potential recruitment centers are monitored - if necessary by covert operations that embrace infiltration, informants, electronic and other surveillance, and telephone intercepts.
Technology is a priority. This week, federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock opened a A$19 million centre for anti-terrorism policing to improve forensic examination of possible terror acts, including rapid testing for chemical and radioactive material and biological threats such as anthrax. The AFP already runs a High Tech Crime Centre.
A series of tough and controversial new laws - many of which have been severely criticised by civil rights groups for their severity - have given law agencies sweeping powers to investigate, arrest and hold terror suspects. These include extended detention without charge - under which Haneef is being questioned - and control orders that tightly restrict the movements and associations of people considered to be a terrorist threat but against whom there is insufficient evidence to prosecute.
The huge flow of foreign and domestic information is co-ordinated through the National Counter-Terrorism Committee, and fed into the complex network of federal and state agencies concerned with law enforcement, immigration, border protection, and protection of key infrastructure from computer systems to oil rigs.
Federal police and military units provide serious muscle - including the Army's SAS and commandos - adding to specialist counter-terror intelligence and Swat teams in the states. The states also have their own, tough, anti-terror laws to complement federal legislation.
The arrest of Haneef is a case study of how the system works, flowing from international investigation and co-operation in London, to Asio's Threat Assessment Centre in Canberra, and on to federal and state agencies in Brisbane.
The response to an attack - at the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Sydney in September, for example - would be co-ordinated by Canberra but controlled operationally by the state Government.
As soon as the attack was confirmed, the Protective Security Co-ordination Centre in the federal Attorney-General's Department would be alerted and the machinery would begin to spin. State police action would be backed by any necessary federal resources and a joint intelligence group would be set up by state, AFP, Asio and defence officers.
Federally, other states would be alerted and brought into the loop. If serious enough, an attack - or a threat against key federal, aviation or maritime targets - could be declared a "national terrorist situation". This would pass control to Canberra.
Preventing events reaching such a degree is Australia's over-arching priority.
But Prime Minister John Howard warned after the failed British bombings: "None of us should take for granted that this couldn't happen in Australia. It could happen in Australia."
No room for complacency
New Zealand is not considered a terrorist target but recent history has proved we are not immune.
People wanting to learn about or make weapons of mass destruction have come to New Zealand, Richard Woods told the New Zealand Herald in a rare interview after announcing his retirement as director of the Security Intelligence Service (SIS).
"The risk is real. There have been such attempts during my time in the job," Woods said in October. "We have to try to prevent New Zealand being used as a place in or through which knowledge or things used in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction can be obtained."
Unlike Australia, we are not closely aligned to the United States "war on terror" and most of our military commitment in Afghanistan is in reconstruction.
A low prospect of being a terrorist target doesn't mean an attack won't happen, notes police head of counter-terrorism, Assistant Commissioner Jon White. Mossad considered New Zealand an ideal country from which to steal passports for its agents to use in espionage, until its operatives were caught in 2004.
Woods rated the risk of an attack on New Zealand as low but the country was vulnerable in other ways to attacks on the interests of other countries, such as embassies, and of people using New Zealand as a safe haven from which to facilitate attacks elsewhere.
Counter-terrorism is a growth industry worldwide and that is reflected in the resources New Zealand allocates to it. In the seven years Richard Woods headed the SIS, counter-terrorism became the biggest single user of resources, rising from 20 to 40 per cent of its budget. In that time SIS staff increased from 100 to 170.
The country's security system is based on shared intelligence among domestic agencies and internationally. At its hub is the Prime Minister's Domestic and External Security Group, chaired by Deputy Police Commissioner Steve Long.
That group met last week and assessed available information and implications for New Zealand's security settings (low-threat) . "There were no implications then and there aren't any at the moment that connect the events in London, Glasgow or indeed Brisbane to New Zealand," says White.
Security authorities won't discuss specifics but because those allegedly involved in the bombings are foreign doctors, that is a likely sector to have come under scrutiny.
The police, SIS, Department of Labour (Immigration Service), Customs, Ministry of Transport and the military liaise closely. Transport last year set up a specialist security team, and Immigration's intelligence division works closely with the SIS and police. Section 7 (1) of the Immigration Act enables anyone with a significant criminal history to be rejected.
"Staff receive information from a wide range of national and international sources and are able to respond by placing a flag in the system against an individual or a travel document," group manager, boarder security Api Fiso said last week. If a flagged person tries to come to New Zealand, the Advance Passenger Processing system prevents them boarding a plane.
An Immigration Profiling Group looks at those applying from off-shore. Assessments of risk to New Zealanders travelling overseas is done by the Combined Threat Assessment Group hosted by the SIS.
"No one can guarantee New Zealand is 100 per cent secure but there has been an enormous amount of ground covered since the end of 2001 on shoring up New Zealand's security arrangements," White said.
Since 9/11, overseas postings of New Zealand police have risen from three to nine - Bangkok, Canberra, Sydney, Washington DC, London, Jakarta, Suva, Beijing and Honolulu. While their focus is on trans-national crime, attention is on intelligence-gathering and sharing aimed at keeping New Zealand safe.
- Phil Taylor
