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The trials of a 'good Indian son'
David Marr
July 21, 2007
Illustration: Andrew Wolf
Latest related coverage
Legal chiefs hit out on terror case
MOHAMED Haneef was about to board Singapore Airlines flight 246 when two police entered the departure lounge of Brisbane Airport.
"You are under arrest for providing support to a terrorist organisation," said Detective Sergeant Adam Simms. The doctor was interviewed first at the airport and then after midnight at the Wharf Street headquarters of the Australian Federal Police.
The long arm of the law had reached Haneef from Glasgow, where, 47 hours earlier, his cousin Kafeel Ahmed had driven a burning Jeep Cherokee packed with petrol and gas canisters into an airport terminal. Before that, two cars packed with explosives had been found in London. British police had also arrested Kafeel's brother Sabeel, a doctor, at a hospital near Liverpool.
The major detail linking the Brisbane doctor to his cousins' alleged crimes was a mobile phone with a SIM card in his name found it was said in the wreckage of the Jeep at Glasgow Airport. That was until yesterday morning, when ABC radio's AM program revealed police actually seized the phone from Sabeel Ahmed, hundreds of kilometres away.
On that first night in Brisbane, the arrested doctor was not panicking. He insisted he didn't need a lawyer, saying he could straighten this matter out himself. But he was tired. Sometime before Haneef was brought a bed at 3am, he told them he'd been trying to ring British police that afternoon to clear up the matter of the SIM card. His calls weren't returned.
Haneef slept only a few hours before police woke him. Were this an ordinary criminal matter, he would have been charged or released at about this point. But police were for the first time using the nation's new anti-terrorism machinery that allows the prisoner to be questioned for a total of 24 hours over an indeterminate number of days without charges being laid.
At 11am, Simms and Federal Agent Neil Thompson turned on the tape machines for the long interrogation ahead. By this time, police had Haneef's phone and financial records from Australia and Britain. While the prisoner ate breakfast, police had raided his Southport flat, turning up notebooks and diaries. They had yet to strip down Haneef's computer, but they weren't starting cold. They had evidence of a number of social and financial contacts between the detained man and his accused cousins. Yet by the end of that day, they had not unmasked a terrorist.
Mohamed Haneef emerged from the questioning a nerdy guy with fractured English who has done little in the last decade but study. He has performed to perfection the classic role of the good Indian son becoming a doctor, supporting his mother, seeing his sister married and marrying well himself. He told police: "I am the sole carer for my family."
He was 18 when his father, a teacher, died in 1997. With a scholarship, Haneef entered medical school in Bangalore. The family lived in an ugly lower-middle-class Muslim quarter of concrete flats. Old neighbours still speak highly of a wholesome and studious boy. After graduation, his aim was to become a physician, an ambition that took him to England in March 2004.
Money was tight. From his Southport flat, police seized an old diary in which he had meticulously noted the sums he borrowed from Indian doctors to stay afloat in England: £180 ($A420) here, £200 there. He lived in a boarding house run by Mufeed, an Indian charity that looks after newly arrived trainee doctors and dentists. Police would later say Haneef told them his cousins Kafeel and Sabeel lived with him in these digs in Liverpool's Bentley Road. Haneef did not say so.
His second cousins their father was his mother's uncle were the only family he had in England. He spent four or five days with Kafeel at Cambridge that first summer. Something is a bit odd here. Haneef says he was feeling "a bit low", having failed an exam. But the Royal College of Physicians has no record of Haneef failing one of its exams. Kafeel also lent his cousin money: £300, which he didn't want back. "He said, just give it to any of the poor people in India."
From July 2004 to April 2005, he did unpaid work as a locum registrar at Halton hospital, just outside Liverpool. Then, in May, he passed the first round of his physician's exams. It was a life-changing success. What followed was so Indian.
Haneef returned home to bask in his achievement. Now with the prospects of a good job in a Britain, he found a wife. Firdous Arshiya came from a family way up the ladder from Haneef's. They lived in a beautiful house in a beautiful suburb of Bangalore. They were modern Muslims they read, they travelled. The engagement was announced in July, then Haneef returned alone to Britain to begin work at Royal Liverpool Hospital.
His alliance with this family did not come cheap. From his fiancee's brother he borrowed £3000 for the wedding. Here was a source of rich misunderstanding for police who would later trawl through Haneef's financial records: his brother-in-law is Dr Siddique Ahmed and his second cousin is Dr Sabeel Ahmed. Both figure in records as "S. Ahmed".
The wedding took place in Bangalore in November 2005. Haneef told police this was the last time he actually met Kafeel. The newlyweds returned to Liverpool and moved into a flat in Pembroke Place, near the Royal Liverpool. Haneef got himself a mobile phone with a one-year plan. By December he was making his first repayment to "S. Ahmed", a heavy £550.
He was also supporting his family or that is Haneef's explanation for a transaction that makes sense to Indians but puzzled Australian investigators. He paid £960 into Kafeel's British bank account in October 2005, on the understanding that his cousin still in India would pay the same sum to Haneef's family. The doctor's garbled explanation to police reads: "He had made arrangements to pay, through the in India to my family."
By this time, Kafeel's brother Sabeel had turned up in England. Sabeel had been a year or so behind his cousin at medical college in Bangalore. Now he took a job at Halton and often visited Haneef and his wife, Haneef told police, "as a family friend on the weekends".
The following spring, Sabeel drove the Hertz hire car that took a joint family party on a tour of Scotland. The passengers were Haneef and his wife, her parents and her brother. They visited Glasgow, prayed at the mosque, but slept that night in a hotel on the motorway. Oddly, police didn't ask Haneef if they toured the airport.
With his one-year contract at Liverpool drawing to a close in the summer of 2006, Haneef answered a recruitment ad in the British Medical Journal and was accepted for a post at Southport Hospital on the Gold Coast. He and his wife packed up their flat and prepared for the journey to Australia via Bangalore.
Haneef left all his "excess baggage" with Sabeel. As well as books, a winter overcoat and a picture he'd been given of the holy shrines of Mecca, Haneef gave Sabeel's address to his bank and gave his cousin an O2 SIM card. "There were some free minutes left on the mobile phone. So he said, 'I would like to use that.' " Haneef understood Sabeel would take over the plan and make the phone his own.
Haneef's first interrogation at Wharf Street went from 11am until about 7.30pm, with breaks for meals and prayers. The tone was mostly polite. The prisoner was willing. He refused only to give his views on the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan: "I don't like to comment." The two police officers didn't press the point.
Haneef denied ever having any training in firearms, explosives or logistics, or ever being part of a terrorist organisation. He denied any knowledge of the Glasgow attack and the London car bombs. He denied knowing his cousins' friends or their politics. He denied raising money for political causes and denied taking part in anything that could be considered jihad. "Every drop of blood is human," he said. "And I feel for every human being."
THE police probed his religious beliefs. Was he Sunni or Shiite? "I'm basically a Muslim, that's all." Had he had formal religious training? "No." Where did he pray? Sometimes in a hospital prayer room, sometimes at the Liverpool mosque and later at the Gold Coast mosque. "I try to go at least once a day."
Much of the questioning involved the financial transactions that bound this young doctor to his family: repayments of his wedding loan, repayments of a small loan to finance his sister's wedding and monthly payments to his family in Bangalore. In Australia he was sending up to $3000 a month from his $70,000-a-year salary back to his family.
Haneef began work at the Gold Coast Hospital in September last year and lived with his wife in a one-bedroom flat in Pohlman Street, Southport. Firdous became pregnant soon after the move and returned to Bangalore in March. "We didn't have enough support here," said Haneef.
Their daughter Haniya was born by emergency caesarean on June 26. That day, Sabeel "chatted" with his cousin on the internet, offering congratulations on the birth. That was their last contact. A couple of days later, the mother and child were readmitted to hospital. The baby had jaundice. Haneef would later claim he was prevented from flying home at this point because there was no cover for him at the hospital.
Late on the afternoon of Friday, June 29, news broke in Australia that a car had been found in London stacked with explosive material. Over the next couple of days, a second car was found and then the flaming Jeep Cherokee was driven into the Glasgow Airport terminal. By Sunday morning on the Gold Coast, Haneef's two cousins had been arrested: a badly burnt Kafeel in Glasgow, and Sabeel at Halton hospital.
Sabeel's mother rang Haneef from Bangalore that morning. British police had rung her looking for him. She said: "There was something wrong with your mobile phone. Someone was misusing the thing." She gave Haneef the number of Tony Webster, one of the British investigators.
Haneef got a week's leave from the hospital and rang his father-in-law in Bangalore, asking him to arrange and pay for a ticket home. By this time he knew Sabeel had been taken into custody. He says his father-in-law reassured him: "Come here and we'll have support here for you." Haneef was booked to fly late the following night.
Sometime on the Monday, Haneef left his Honda Jazz, some jewellery and a laptop computer with Mohamed Asif Ali, one of his colleagues at the hospital. This would lead to Ali being detained under new counter-terrorism powers, for the AFP suspected Haneef was acting "to conceal evidence". (This innocent bystander was released after 24 hours, having been vilified globally as an associate of terrorists. Ali faces 5 years in prison if he reveals what happened to him in custody.)
That afternoon, Haneef tried four times to ring Webster's number. Police knew the precise details: three goes between 3.08 and 3.29pm and another at 4.32pm. Haneef said: "I didn't get any response to that number." No mention of this attempt to co-operate with the British police was made in the dossier that convinced Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews to cancel Haneef's visa on character grounds.
That night, Haneef was arrested. Why was he leaving on a one-way ticket, asked police? "I going to get a ticket on my own, with my money when I come back," replied Haneef. The interviewing officer would later give the Brisbane bail court an affidavit that stated Haneef "had no explanation as to why he did not have a return ticket".
Before the tapes were turned off on that first day's interrogation, Haneef told police: "I haven't done any of the crimes. Just want to let you know. And I don't want to spoil my name and my profession. That's the main thing."
On the afternoon of Thursday, July 5, a hard-bitten Brisbane criminal lawyer called Peter Russo had a call from the Brisbane watchhouse to say there was someone in the cells needing a lawyer. "It's not an unusual request," Russo told The Age. "I've been called to the watchhouse more times than I care to remember." But this wasn't a drunk or a petty crim needing help; it was the man being billed in the press as the nation's most notorious terrorist prisoner.
Haneef had spent the best part of two days and two nights since his interrogation in a double cell with a 5 metre-by-7 metre yard attached. He had had access to magazines but no daily papers. He had made only one phone call, to the Indian consulate, to send a message to his family that he would not be arriving as expected.
Each time the police returned to the magistrate to ask permission to hold their prisoner longer, Haneef was offered the right to be represented by a lawyer. He had kept saying no until the middle of Thursday afternoon. So Russo appeared. They spent less than an hour together. Haneef's instructions were simple: "I want to go home."
The secretive nature of the proceedings was quickly apparent when the hearing began at 7pm. Russo was not allowed to hear the police evidence against his client. The magistrate's decision was made in the lawyer's absence. All Russo could do was put on record that his client was willing to continue to co-operate. The magistrate decided the prisoner could be held for a further 96 hours.
Russo's appearance marked a turning point in the case. That night Haneef briefed him and next day Russo rang round the Brisbane bar and engaged Stephen Keim, SC. Their strategy was to force the Government to provide information to explain why it wished to continue to hold Haneef without charge. Keim told ABC's Lateline: "I went before the magistrate, they handed up the secret information to the magistrate. I said, 'Hey, that's not natural justice. I've got a right to make submissions, I've got a right to know generally what your case is.' "
Huge police resources were being thrown at the Haneef matter. Police were stripping his computer. "I am told it is the equivalent of reading 31,000 pages of paper to look at the amount of material that actually has to be analysed," said Attorney-General Philip Ruddock. And the story was a continuing bushfire in the media, with a steady series of leaks suggesting Haneef was in fact a darker figure than the Government could ever reveal.
In the end, the police folded. Thirteen pages of material were given to Haneef's lawyers, "material that two days earlier was so secret and so highly protected, I could not get one letter of it", said Keim. Rather than debate the need to continue holding Haneef, police announced last Friday that they would use the last hours allowed to them to conduct a second interrogation.
THAT went all through the night over 15 hours. Russo was present. About 7.30 next morning, the police told him they would be charging his client under the Commonwealth Criminal Code with intentionally providing a SIM card "to a terrorist organisation consisting of a group of persons including Sabeel Ahmed and Kafeel Ahmed, being reckless as to whether the organisation was a terrorist organisation".
Being charged returned Haneef to the traditional criminal system. His lawyers immediately applied for bail. The Age understands the magistrate queried the logic of anyone giving a SIM card to terrorists: surely its discovery would immediately implicate them? Barristers for the Crown argued the phone was intended to be obliterated in the fire that destroyed the Jeep Cherokee in Glasgow.
Magistrate Jacqui Payne was not impressed. After considering her decision over the weekend, she granted Haneef bail last Monday. She noted there was no evidence of a direct link between him and the group blamed for the failed terrorist plot, nor evidence that Haneef had intentionally provided his SIM card to a terrorist organisation. She set bail at $10,000 and under stringent reporting conditions ordered his release.
But the freedom she granted was immediately taken away by the Immigration Minister. In a move that set off a depth charge in the legal profession, Kevin Andrews cancelled Haneef's work visa on "character" grounds, claiming to "reasonably suspect Dr Haneef has had an association with persons involved in criminal conduct, namely terrorism".
That power is designed to detain convicted non-citizens for deportation. It has apparently never been used to detain non-citizens pending court proceedings. The president of Liberty Victoria, Julian Burnside QC, declared this "a serious misuse of power". The president of the Australian Bar Association, Stephen Estcourt QC, called Andrews' move "a threat to the rule of law".
In the end, Haneef chose to remain in prison in Brisbane rather than be shuttled back and forth to Villawood detention centre on the outskirts of Sydney. He was driven away to his new home last Wednesday, shoeless and in a prison smock, hunched on the floor of a paddy wagon.
That morning, details from the 142-page transcript of Haneef's first interrogation were published in The Australian. The Prime Minister and Attorney-General were outraged but for the first time, daylight had flooded in on the case. More light will be shed when the transcript of the second far longer interrogation is released to the media, perhaps as early as this weekend.
With the case against the prisoner already looking thin, news broke yesterday that the SIM card the single vivid detail that had seen Haneef interrogated, charged and stripped of his visa was not in the burning Jeep at Glasgow. It had never made it to the scene of the crime but was still where Haneef had left it, down south in the possession of his cousin Sabeel who has not been charged as a terrorist in Britain.
The collapse of this crucial evidence is not swaying the Government. AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty urged lawyers and journalists to stop commenting on the case. Kevin Andrews refused to reconsider the scrapping of Haneef's visa because he claims there's still a secret dossier of evidence against the man. Win or lose, he wants the doctor gone. Challenging that decision in the Federal Court is the next round in this saga. The date set is August 8.
With CONNIE LEVETT, JOEL GIBSON and AMRIT DHILLON
David Marr is a senior Fairfax writer.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-de...1184560040649.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
David Marr
July 21, 2007
Illustration: Andrew Wolf
Latest related coverage
Legal chiefs hit out on terror case
MOHAMED Haneef was about to board Singapore Airlines flight 246 when two police entered the departure lounge of Brisbane Airport.
"You are under arrest for providing support to a terrorist organisation," said Detective Sergeant Adam Simms. The doctor was interviewed first at the airport and then after midnight at the Wharf Street headquarters of the Australian Federal Police.
The long arm of the law had reached Haneef from Glasgow, where, 47 hours earlier, his cousin Kafeel Ahmed had driven a burning Jeep Cherokee packed with petrol and gas canisters into an airport terminal. Before that, two cars packed with explosives had been found in London. British police had also arrested Kafeel's brother Sabeel, a doctor, at a hospital near Liverpool.
The major detail linking the Brisbane doctor to his cousins' alleged crimes was a mobile phone with a SIM card in his name found it was said in the wreckage of the Jeep at Glasgow Airport. That was until yesterday morning, when ABC radio's AM program revealed police actually seized the phone from Sabeel Ahmed, hundreds of kilometres away.
On that first night in Brisbane, the arrested doctor was not panicking. He insisted he didn't need a lawyer, saying he could straighten this matter out himself. But he was tired. Sometime before Haneef was brought a bed at 3am, he told them he'd been trying to ring British police that afternoon to clear up the matter of the SIM card. His calls weren't returned.
Haneef slept only a few hours before police woke him. Were this an ordinary criminal matter, he would have been charged or released at about this point. But police were for the first time using the nation's new anti-terrorism machinery that allows the prisoner to be questioned for a total of 24 hours over an indeterminate number of days without charges being laid.
At 11am, Simms and Federal Agent Neil Thompson turned on the tape machines for the long interrogation ahead. By this time, police had Haneef's phone and financial records from Australia and Britain. While the prisoner ate breakfast, police had raided his Southport flat, turning up notebooks and diaries. They had yet to strip down Haneef's computer, but they weren't starting cold. They had evidence of a number of social and financial contacts between the detained man and his accused cousins. Yet by the end of that day, they had not unmasked a terrorist.
Mohamed Haneef emerged from the questioning a nerdy guy with fractured English who has done little in the last decade but study. He has performed to perfection the classic role of the good Indian son becoming a doctor, supporting his mother, seeing his sister married and marrying well himself. He told police: "I am the sole carer for my family."
He was 18 when his father, a teacher, died in 1997. With a scholarship, Haneef entered medical school in Bangalore. The family lived in an ugly lower-middle-class Muslim quarter of concrete flats. Old neighbours still speak highly of a wholesome and studious boy. After graduation, his aim was to become a physician, an ambition that took him to England in March 2004.
Money was tight. From his Southport flat, police seized an old diary in which he had meticulously noted the sums he borrowed from Indian doctors to stay afloat in England: £180 ($A420) here, £200 there. He lived in a boarding house run by Mufeed, an Indian charity that looks after newly arrived trainee doctors and dentists. Police would later say Haneef told them his cousins Kafeel and Sabeel lived with him in these digs in Liverpool's Bentley Road. Haneef did not say so.
His second cousins their father was his mother's uncle were the only family he had in England. He spent four or five days with Kafeel at Cambridge that first summer. Something is a bit odd here. Haneef says he was feeling "a bit low", having failed an exam. But the Royal College of Physicians has no record of Haneef failing one of its exams. Kafeel also lent his cousin money: £300, which he didn't want back. "He said, just give it to any of the poor people in India."
From July 2004 to April 2005, he did unpaid work as a locum registrar at Halton hospital, just outside Liverpool. Then, in May, he passed the first round of his physician's exams. It was a life-changing success. What followed was so Indian.
Haneef returned home to bask in his achievement. Now with the prospects of a good job in a Britain, he found a wife. Firdous Arshiya came from a family way up the ladder from Haneef's. They lived in a beautiful house in a beautiful suburb of Bangalore. They were modern Muslims they read, they travelled. The engagement was announced in July, then Haneef returned alone to Britain to begin work at Royal Liverpool Hospital.
His alliance with this family did not come cheap. From his fiancee's brother he borrowed £3000 for the wedding. Here was a source of rich misunderstanding for police who would later trawl through Haneef's financial records: his brother-in-law is Dr Siddique Ahmed and his second cousin is Dr Sabeel Ahmed. Both figure in records as "S. Ahmed".
The wedding took place in Bangalore in November 2005. Haneef told police this was the last time he actually met Kafeel. The newlyweds returned to Liverpool and moved into a flat in Pembroke Place, near the Royal Liverpool. Haneef got himself a mobile phone with a one-year plan. By December he was making his first repayment to "S. Ahmed", a heavy £550.
He was also supporting his family or that is Haneef's explanation for a transaction that makes sense to Indians but puzzled Australian investigators. He paid £960 into Kafeel's British bank account in October 2005, on the understanding that his cousin still in India would pay the same sum to Haneef's family. The doctor's garbled explanation to police reads: "He had made arrangements to pay, through the in India to my family."
By this time, Kafeel's brother Sabeel had turned up in England. Sabeel had been a year or so behind his cousin at medical college in Bangalore. Now he took a job at Halton and often visited Haneef and his wife, Haneef told police, "as a family friend on the weekends".
The following spring, Sabeel drove the Hertz hire car that took a joint family party on a tour of Scotland. The passengers were Haneef and his wife, her parents and her brother. They visited Glasgow, prayed at the mosque, but slept that night in a hotel on the motorway. Oddly, police didn't ask Haneef if they toured the airport.
With his one-year contract at Liverpool drawing to a close in the summer of 2006, Haneef answered a recruitment ad in the British Medical Journal and was accepted for a post at Southport Hospital on the Gold Coast. He and his wife packed up their flat and prepared for the journey to Australia via Bangalore.
Haneef left all his "excess baggage" with Sabeel. As well as books, a winter overcoat and a picture he'd been given of the holy shrines of Mecca, Haneef gave Sabeel's address to his bank and gave his cousin an O2 SIM card. "There were some free minutes left on the mobile phone. So he said, 'I would like to use that.' " Haneef understood Sabeel would take over the plan and make the phone his own.
Haneef's first interrogation at Wharf Street went from 11am until about 7.30pm, with breaks for meals and prayers. The tone was mostly polite. The prisoner was willing. He refused only to give his views on the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan: "I don't like to comment." The two police officers didn't press the point.
Haneef denied ever having any training in firearms, explosives or logistics, or ever being part of a terrorist organisation. He denied any knowledge of the Glasgow attack and the London car bombs. He denied knowing his cousins' friends or their politics. He denied raising money for political causes and denied taking part in anything that could be considered jihad. "Every drop of blood is human," he said. "And I feel for every human being."
THE police probed his religious beliefs. Was he Sunni or Shiite? "I'm basically a Muslim, that's all." Had he had formal religious training? "No." Where did he pray? Sometimes in a hospital prayer room, sometimes at the Liverpool mosque and later at the Gold Coast mosque. "I try to go at least once a day."
Much of the questioning involved the financial transactions that bound this young doctor to his family: repayments of his wedding loan, repayments of a small loan to finance his sister's wedding and monthly payments to his family in Bangalore. In Australia he was sending up to $3000 a month from his $70,000-a-year salary back to his family.
Haneef began work at the Gold Coast Hospital in September last year and lived with his wife in a one-bedroom flat in Pohlman Street, Southport. Firdous became pregnant soon after the move and returned to Bangalore in March. "We didn't have enough support here," said Haneef.
Their daughter Haniya was born by emergency caesarean on June 26. That day, Sabeel "chatted" with his cousin on the internet, offering congratulations on the birth. That was their last contact. A couple of days later, the mother and child were readmitted to hospital. The baby had jaundice. Haneef would later claim he was prevented from flying home at this point because there was no cover for him at the hospital.
Late on the afternoon of Friday, June 29, news broke in Australia that a car had been found in London stacked with explosive material. Over the next couple of days, a second car was found and then the flaming Jeep Cherokee was driven into the Glasgow Airport terminal. By Sunday morning on the Gold Coast, Haneef's two cousins had been arrested: a badly burnt Kafeel in Glasgow, and Sabeel at Halton hospital.
Sabeel's mother rang Haneef from Bangalore that morning. British police had rung her looking for him. She said: "There was something wrong with your mobile phone. Someone was misusing the thing." She gave Haneef the number of Tony Webster, one of the British investigators.
Haneef got a week's leave from the hospital and rang his father-in-law in Bangalore, asking him to arrange and pay for a ticket home. By this time he knew Sabeel had been taken into custody. He says his father-in-law reassured him: "Come here and we'll have support here for you." Haneef was booked to fly late the following night.
Sometime on the Monday, Haneef left his Honda Jazz, some jewellery and a laptop computer with Mohamed Asif Ali, one of his colleagues at the hospital. This would lead to Ali being detained under new counter-terrorism powers, for the AFP suspected Haneef was acting "to conceal evidence". (This innocent bystander was released after 24 hours, having been vilified globally as an associate of terrorists. Ali faces 5 years in prison if he reveals what happened to him in custody.)
That afternoon, Haneef tried four times to ring Webster's number. Police knew the precise details: three goes between 3.08 and 3.29pm and another at 4.32pm. Haneef said: "I didn't get any response to that number." No mention of this attempt to co-operate with the British police was made in the dossier that convinced Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews to cancel Haneef's visa on character grounds.
That night, Haneef was arrested. Why was he leaving on a one-way ticket, asked police? "I going to get a ticket on my own, with my money when I come back," replied Haneef. The interviewing officer would later give the Brisbane bail court an affidavit that stated Haneef "had no explanation as to why he did not have a return ticket".
Before the tapes were turned off on that first day's interrogation, Haneef told police: "I haven't done any of the crimes. Just want to let you know. And I don't want to spoil my name and my profession. That's the main thing."
On the afternoon of Thursday, July 5, a hard-bitten Brisbane criminal lawyer called Peter Russo had a call from the Brisbane watchhouse to say there was someone in the cells needing a lawyer. "It's not an unusual request," Russo told The Age. "I've been called to the watchhouse more times than I care to remember." But this wasn't a drunk or a petty crim needing help; it was the man being billed in the press as the nation's most notorious terrorist prisoner.
Haneef had spent the best part of two days and two nights since his interrogation in a double cell with a 5 metre-by-7 metre yard attached. He had had access to magazines but no daily papers. He had made only one phone call, to the Indian consulate, to send a message to his family that he would not be arriving as expected.
Each time the police returned to the magistrate to ask permission to hold their prisoner longer, Haneef was offered the right to be represented by a lawyer. He had kept saying no until the middle of Thursday afternoon. So Russo appeared. They spent less than an hour together. Haneef's instructions were simple: "I want to go home."
The secretive nature of the proceedings was quickly apparent when the hearing began at 7pm. Russo was not allowed to hear the police evidence against his client. The magistrate's decision was made in the lawyer's absence. All Russo could do was put on record that his client was willing to continue to co-operate. The magistrate decided the prisoner could be held for a further 96 hours.
Russo's appearance marked a turning point in the case. That night Haneef briefed him and next day Russo rang round the Brisbane bar and engaged Stephen Keim, SC. Their strategy was to force the Government to provide information to explain why it wished to continue to hold Haneef without charge. Keim told ABC's Lateline: "I went before the magistrate, they handed up the secret information to the magistrate. I said, 'Hey, that's not natural justice. I've got a right to make submissions, I've got a right to know generally what your case is.' "
Huge police resources were being thrown at the Haneef matter. Police were stripping his computer. "I am told it is the equivalent of reading 31,000 pages of paper to look at the amount of material that actually has to be analysed," said Attorney-General Philip Ruddock. And the story was a continuing bushfire in the media, with a steady series of leaks suggesting Haneef was in fact a darker figure than the Government could ever reveal.
In the end, the police folded. Thirteen pages of material were given to Haneef's lawyers, "material that two days earlier was so secret and so highly protected, I could not get one letter of it", said Keim. Rather than debate the need to continue holding Haneef, police announced last Friday that they would use the last hours allowed to them to conduct a second interrogation.
THAT went all through the night over 15 hours. Russo was present. About 7.30 next morning, the police told him they would be charging his client under the Commonwealth Criminal Code with intentionally providing a SIM card "to a terrorist organisation consisting of a group of persons including Sabeel Ahmed and Kafeel Ahmed, being reckless as to whether the organisation was a terrorist organisation".
Being charged returned Haneef to the traditional criminal system. His lawyers immediately applied for bail. The Age understands the magistrate queried the logic of anyone giving a SIM card to terrorists: surely its discovery would immediately implicate them? Barristers for the Crown argued the phone was intended to be obliterated in the fire that destroyed the Jeep Cherokee in Glasgow.
Magistrate Jacqui Payne was not impressed. After considering her decision over the weekend, she granted Haneef bail last Monday. She noted there was no evidence of a direct link between him and the group blamed for the failed terrorist plot, nor evidence that Haneef had intentionally provided his SIM card to a terrorist organisation. She set bail at $10,000 and under stringent reporting conditions ordered his release.
But the freedom she granted was immediately taken away by the Immigration Minister. In a move that set off a depth charge in the legal profession, Kevin Andrews cancelled Haneef's work visa on "character" grounds, claiming to "reasonably suspect Dr Haneef has had an association with persons involved in criminal conduct, namely terrorism".
That power is designed to detain convicted non-citizens for deportation. It has apparently never been used to detain non-citizens pending court proceedings. The president of Liberty Victoria, Julian Burnside QC, declared this "a serious misuse of power". The president of the Australian Bar Association, Stephen Estcourt QC, called Andrews' move "a threat to the rule of law".
In the end, Haneef chose to remain in prison in Brisbane rather than be shuttled back and forth to Villawood detention centre on the outskirts of Sydney. He was driven away to his new home last Wednesday, shoeless and in a prison smock, hunched on the floor of a paddy wagon.
That morning, details from the 142-page transcript of Haneef's first interrogation were published in The Australian. The Prime Minister and Attorney-General were outraged but for the first time, daylight had flooded in on the case. More light will be shed when the transcript of the second far longer interrogation is released to the media, perhaps as early as this weekend.
With the case against the prisoner already looking thin, news broke yesterday that the SIM card the single vivid detail that had seen Haneef interrogated, charged and stripped of his visa was not in the burning Jeep at Glasgow. It had never made it to the scene of the crime but was still where Haneef had left it, down south in the possession of his cousin Sabeel who has not been charged as a terrorist in Britain.
The collapse of this crucial evidence is not swaying the Government. AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty urged lawyers and journalists to stop commenting on the case. Kevin Andrews refused to reconsider the scrapping of Haneef's visa because he claims there's still a secret dossier of evidence against the man. Win or lose, he wants the doctor gone. Challenging that decision in the Federal Court is the next round in this saga. The date set is August 8.
With CONNIE LEVETT, JOEL GIBSON and AMRIT DHILLON
David Marr is a senior Fairfax writer.
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