How a bin dump exposed Australia’s first terror plot
Australia’s first convicted terrorist who plotted to blow up military bases and the electricity power grid but was busted after a failed dead letter drop, is now set to walk from jail.
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Australia’s first terrorist to be convicted of plotting a home soil attack is set to be released from jail after serving 15 years for attempting to create a mass casualty bomb on military bases and the power grid.
Pakistan-born architect Faheem Khalid Lodhi came unstuck as ASIO spies watched him perform a dead letter drop of his plans in a garbage bin in Sydney’s west.
Lodhi was sentenced to 20 years in June 2006 after three years earlier attempting to order chemicals, collecting maps of the nation’s electricity supply and aerials of military bases including Holsworthy and Victoria barracks in Sydney in what the court heard has linked to fellow notorious French terrorist Willie Brigitte who was dispatched to Australia by the al-Qaeda backed Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Toiba. He is currently in a Paris maximum security jail and had gone on to be linked to other attacks including the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.
ASIO suspected Lodhi, an Australian citizen living in Sydney’s western suburb of Punchbowl, was the point man who had met various terror targets during trips to Pakistan to assist them in gaining military training at mountain camps in that country and was the contact for Brigitte and another terror suspect hatching a plot here in Sydney.
With time served and good behaviour is due to be released on April 24 with automatic parole although the matter is due to be reviewed by federal Attorney-General Christian Porter.
A spokesman for Mr Porter said: “The issue of parole in this case is not yet before the Attorney-General. Parole decisions take into account a range of factors, most important of which is community safety.”
At the time of his arrest Lodhi was a hardened extremist Sunni but while at Goulburn’s Supermax had been conducted moderate Islamic prayer sessions and teachings for the prison population and has even been conducting jail house marriage ceremonies including of alleged contract killer, Brothers 4 Life enforcer and UFC fighter Rodney ‘Goldie’ Atkinson’ to his girlfriend.
THE DROP
Despite the heavy storm clouds threatening overhead, Faheem Khalid Lodhi decided he and his family would go to Garrison Point Recreation Park in Georges Hall in Sydney’s south west.
An ASIO surveillance brief clocked his park arrival at 3.14pm on that October 25, 2003 afternoon; he seemingly not noticing the weather nor the car with their agents watching from a discreet distance.
The 34-year-old Pakistan-born Lodhi loitered for a time, took a phone call then there was a crack of lightening and it began to rain, not just rain but a torrential down pour and he retreated back to his car.
At 4pm he and his family left that park and drove less than a kilometre to the nearby Lake Gillawarna Reserve carpark.
“At this location (Lodhi) was seen to get out of his vehicle, place an envelope in a garbage bin in a park and then re-enter the vehicle and depart the area,” ASIO recorded.
“About 4.05pm the operative retrieved the item from the bin. The item was an A4 sized manila envelope ….”
And so began the case that would see Lodhi become the first person in Australia convicted of planning a home soil terror attack, the apparent hatred for this country by this Australian citizen linked to other notorious figures from here all the way to Pakistan and France and associates who years later would go on to be involved in their own terror plots including in Sydney and Melbourne and the 2015 Paris terrorist massacre.
Now he is set for release, his more than a decade in jail apparently seeing him reformed and ready to resume a quiet life at his home in western Sydney.
A violent Islamic jihadist linked to a Pakistani terror group or a confused victim of circumstance?
In 2003, when he placed an envelope in that bin with aerial images of the targets he and others planned to bomb and kill as many people as possible, it would certainly seem the former and introduced Australia to the touch of terrorism in a post 9/11 era.
PATH TO EXTREMISM
Lodhi was born December 28, 1969 in Pakistan to a good family and had a normal life running about the streets of industrial city Sialkot. He was a devout Sunni Muslim. He attended Lahore’s prestigious National College of Arts and graduated with a degree in architecture. But he wanted a new life and chose Australia.
“In Pakistan, life is hard,’’ he would later tell authorities.
“It’s hard to survive even though you work seven days a week. I decided to go somewhere I can do better. My intention was to get on with life, to settle down here, to do some more education and to look for a job.”
He emigrated to Australia in 1998, with his future wife Doctor Aysha Hamedd and settled in a nice home in Lakemba and later Punchbowl and attended University of Sydney to earn a Bachelor of Architecture and a project management certificate from TAFE NSW.
He would visit his family back in Pakistan but authorities suspected he did more on these trips and became the go-between for foreign militants travelling into the secret mountain training camps of al-Qaeda linked terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
It was here in early 2003 he also met two other Australian men of Pakistani and Arabic descent who would later be charged with unrelated terror plots.
One of those at the camp in 2001 was also Frenchman Willie Brigitte who would later come to Australia with the intent to conduct a terror act. But he was caught on an immigration technicality and deported back to Paris.
Lodhi was evolving into an Islamic fundamentalist, believed strongly Australia had illegally invaded Iraq during the war and privately was justifying his future actions with the interpretation of the Koran that states: “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war to strike terror into the hearts of our enemies.”
SURVEILLANCE
On October 22, 2003 ASIO watched as Lodhi, using a string of aliases, sat at a computer at an internet shop in Campsie at 10.30pm before he walked around the corner to a phone box and rang a number in Pakistan later identified as belonging to an LeT militant leader, a Mr S, who was also in contact with Brigitte and paid for his trip to Australia.
Two days later Lodhi would make the dead letter drop, leaving in that park bin the envelope which was found to have aerial images of Sydney military bases HMAS Penguin, Holsworthy Army Base and Victoria Barracks.
On October 26, ASIO and the Australian Federal Police raided Lodhi’s architectural office workplace and found he had two weeks earlier attempted to order chemicals. The suspicious order fax was actually found days earlier by his boss who in a post 9/11 world had the foresight to contact NSW Police.
Then the most damning find of all, a 15-page handwritten notebook in Urdu with instructions on how to make chemical fires, petrol bombs, poison, cyanide gas, timing devices, lead oxite, urea nitrate and potassium chlorate. The notes also had research on “dead drops” — “a physical location where communications, documents or equipment is covertly placed for another to collect without direct contact between parties” he wrote.
DEAD DROP
The notes matched his order of chemicals, his bin run that of his dead drop notes, the phone numbers linking him to Brigitte and the shadowy Mr S in Pakistan. In Lodhi’s home they found purchased maps of power infrastructure in Australia, a US military training manual, 600 files related to Islamic extremism and details including where to buy a fake passport and receipts for mobile phones registered to false names he, Brigitte and Mr S used to contact each other as well as a Sydney medical student and LeT military trained graduate who would later be charged with terrorist-related offences but let free on a legal technicality.
Brigitte arrived in Australia in May 2003 on a tourist visa having been dispatched by LeT to carry out various terror attacks allegedly including an al-Qaeda sponsored plot to murder Australian businessman and orthodox rabbi Joseph Gutnick. He was met at the airport by Lodhi and in authorities surmised the pair were suspected of accused of having “the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, namely violent jihad and with the intention of coercing or influencing, by intimidation, the government of the commonwealth or a state or territory or foreign country, or intimidating the public or a section of the public”.
Lodhi denied it all as coincidences but was found guilty in June 2006 and sentenced to 20 years with a non-parole of 15.
Originally published as How a bin dump exposed Australia’s first terror plot
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