Haneef prosecutor demoted

THE prosecutor at the centre of the Mohamed Haneef debacle involving the commonwealth DPP and Australian Federal Police has been punished with a demotion, triggering protests from fellow lawyers and calls for AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty to take responsibility for the mistakes by his officers.

THE prosecutor at the centre of the Mohamed Haneef debacle involving the commonwealth DPP and Australian Federal Police has been punished with a demotion, triggering protests from fellow lawyers and calls for AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty to take responsibility for the mistakes by his officers.

Sources told The Australian yesterday that Clive Porritt, a prosecutor of long standing in the Brisbane office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, was being stripped of his senior rank and demoted to a lesser position with fewer benefits and a major reduction in salary.

Mr Porritt relied on incorrect advice from AFP officers when he gave a Brisbane magistrate in July wrong information about Dr Haneef, the exonerated former Gold Coast Hospital registrar wrongly accused of terrorism-related offences.

Mr Porritt wrongly said that Dr Haneef had lived in Britain with his second cousins, both of whom were accused of being behind attempted suicide bombings in London and Glasgow in late June. Mr Porritt also wrongly told Brisbane magistrate Jacqui Payne that Dr Haneef's old mobile phone SIM card was found in a burning Jeep in Glasgow. In fact, it was recovered hundreds of kilometres away in Liverpool.

Senior Brisbane criminal defence lawyer Peter Callaghan SC yesterday lashed the decision to demote Mr Porritt.

"Clive Porritt is a man of unimpeachable integrity whose working life has been one of exemplary public service," said Mr Callaghan, a former prosecutor in the commonwealth DPP.

"It is extraordinary that he is being scapegoated over a process which involved so many others, and which was generated in the first place by the AFP."

Another criminal defence lawyer, Andrew Boe, said: "The buck should start and stop at the hands of the AFP, whose officers provided the misinformation and who had the primary responsibility of ensuring accuracy in information placed before the court by Mr Porritt.

"He has been punished for what could only be seen as a collection of errors by a number of agencies, particularly the Australian Federal Police."

Mr Boe said Mr Keelty had spent "an enormous amount of energy and public funds pursuing a bogus case against Dr Mohamed Haneef".

Mr Porritt's demotion comes as Mr Keelty, in an interview with The Bulletin magazine today, claims that he knew the charge being considered against Dr Haneef was "touch and go".

Mr Keelty said he had personally warned commonwealth DPP Damian Bugg QC that there was insufficient evidence.

"I was as surprised as anybody when the DPP advised that Dr Haneef could be charged, because I didn't think the evidence was strong enough," he told The Bulletin.

"They're independent of police, they're independent of the investigation, and we relied on their legal advice.

"In these sorts of cases, we're not necessarily going to have the smoking gun. Mine was an opinion that I expressed to the DPP, but I understood all the time that the prosecutor was independent of me and independent of the investigation and needed to come up with a view for himself."

Mr Keelty did not say in his interview whether he advised Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, who cancelled Dr Haneef's visa, that the criminal charge against the doctor was "touch and go".

Mr Andrews said that he had relied on secret information from the AFP for his decision to incarcerate Dr Haneef after a magistrate had granted him bail.

Mr Bugg, in a statement before ending his contract as DPP earlier this month, repeated his earlier acknowledgment that Dr Haneef should never have been charged, and that factual errors were put before the Brisbane Magistrates Court as a result of wrong information from the AFP.

The case collapsed in late July as a result of disclosures in The Australian of police bungling.

Dr Haneef is continuing a legal fight for the reinstatement of hisvisa.