Guilty of plotting mass murder

CANBERRA: Five men have been convicted of conspiring to bring terror and mass death to Australia with bombs and firearms, ending the country's longest-ever trial amid loud protests by supporters outside a special high-security courtroom in Sydney.

The men had amassed chemicals to produce explosives, held thousands of rounds of ammunition, and organised what prosecutors alleged were terror training camps in rural New South Wales.

One was alleged to have trained with the Pakistani-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Sydney-based cell was linked to the Melbourne group led by radical Islamic cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, since convicted of terror offences.

Both groups were arrested in raids across Melbourne and Sydney in 2005.

A NSW Supreme Court jury returned after almost five weeks' deliberation to find Khaled Cheikho, 36, Mohamed Ali Elomar, 44, Mohammed Omar Jamal, 25, Abdul Rakib Hasan, 40, and Moustafa Cheikho, 32, guilty of conspiring to do acts in preparation for a terrorist act or acts.

Their convictions bring to 17 the number of people found guilty of terrorism and terrorism-related offences in Australia, including the six convicted with Benbrika last year.

Juries found that both the Sydney and Melbourne groups advocated violent jihad, accepting Benbrika's argument that causing the deaths of women, children and the elderly was permissible under Islamic law.

Benbrika's group had planned attacks to cause mass deaths at football games or train stations.

In Sydney, prosecutors did not identify the targets of any planned action by the five men, but detailed the incriminating results of intense surveillance by counter-terrorism agents.

This included 30 days of tapes, 18 hours of phone intercepts, 3000 exhibits and 300 witnesses, produced to the court during the course of the 10-month trial.

Prosecutors said that between July 2004 and November 2005 the group had planned and prepared for acts of "extreme force and violence" in a violent jihad that would have involved the deaths of Australians who did not share their fundamentalist, extremist, beliefs.

The court was told that the group believed Islam was under attack, and that its members had been outraged by Australia's involvement in the United States-led invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and by the strong support of former conservative Prime Minister John Howard for former United States President George W. Bush.

During the trial Prosecutor Richard Maidment, QC, said the Sydney men had willingly accepted Benbrika's teachings of violent jihad in Australia, recorded during intercepted phone calls between the two groups.

The court heard that the men had used false names to obtain mobile phones, and that three had attended paramilitary-style training camps in NSW, although the defence maintained these had been family camping trips.

During the raids that led to the arrest of the group, police and counter-terrorism agents seized bomb-making chemicals, batteries and laboratory equipment that the prosecution said was associated with terrorist activities.

The raids also uncovered firearms, a large cache of ammunition, and extremist material that included bomb-making instructions, films of ritual beheadings by Islamic militants, and footage of the September 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York.

Justice Whealey said in his summing up that the accused had been swayed by the Afghani Mujahideen teaching of "you kill us, so we kill you; you bomb us, so we bomb you".