Out of Africa, into the dock

THE court was told Yacqub Khayre was 21, though he didn't look that old. Sitting between two police, he was a jumble of elbows in a black, cotton hoodie, an impassive, smooth face with little use for a razor.

THE court was told Yacqub Khayre was 21, though he didn't look that old. Sitting between two police, he was a jumble of elbows in a black, cotton hoodie, an impassive, smooth face with little use for a razor.

Yet police believe that, for three months this year, Mr Khayre lived in a very adult world. It was Mr Khayre, according to police, who had gone to the dust of Somalia and attended a camp where "weapons and military training may have happened".

It was Mr Khayre, one of five children raised by a single mum in Melbourne, who was said to have sought a fatwa to give jihadist sanction to attacks being planned on the Holsworthy army base in southwestern Sydney and on another military installation in Victoria.

And though the court did not hear this in the scant evidence presented, it was Mr Khayre's return to Australia last month that coincided with the massive, joint police operation, which executed search warrants throughout Melbourne's north early yesterday, shifting into its final phase.

When police in riot gear and armed with assault rifles approached Mr Khayre's family home at 4.30am, they found a suburban street still wrapped in sleep and a brick-veneer house barely distinguishable from its neighbours.

As the sun rose, disbelief grew that such a house in such a suburb could be at the centre of what acting Australian Federal Police chief Tony Negus described as potentially, "the most serious terrorist attack on Australian soil".

A flat suburban expanse. A satellite TV dish on the roof. A garish yellow forensic tent erected in the drive. Whether terrorist or not, it was very much home grown.

When The Australian arrived in the street, young children were being loaded into a car to be driven away.

One of Mr Khayre's sibling is just nine years old. His lawyer asked for the family's name to be suppressed from publication to guard against "violent reactions and retributions". It was an impassioned submission but on this point, magistrate Peter Reardon was unmoved.

Elsewhere around Melbourne, a further 18 search warrants were executed. They came before Mr Reardon, one at a time.

Saney Edow Aweys, a boilermaker by trade, shrugged the offer of legal representation and quietly told the court he was too tired to answer any more questions.

He had worked 20 hours straight the day before police came knocking and had spent the morning in a small interrogation room with a bright light in his eyes.

Abdirahman Ahmed said to have sought a fatwa for the brazen terrorist plot outlined by police, complained he was tired as well.

Like Mr Khayre and Mr Aweys, Mr Ahmed had not been charged when he appeared before Mr Reardon yesterday afternoon. The magistrate ordered they be given a few hours to sleep before questioning continued.

The only alleged member of the conspiracy to be charged at the time of publication yesterday was Nayef El Sayed, who was arrested at his Glenroy home, also in Melbourne's north.

The only suspect who failed to appear was Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, who is in jail awaiting trial for an unrelated alleged assault. According to police, it was Mr Fattal's behaviour at a Melbourne mosque, amid last summer's heatwave, that first piqued their interest Mr Fattal led investigators to a Somali facilitator able to take young men to the Horn of Africa and introduce them to hardened jihadists. It is understood two of the group travelled to Somalia. Mr Kharyre came back.

Police said the investigation would continue, as would the questioning, well into the night. Whatever the outcome, none of these young men will be unremarkable again.