Jihad's motley crew

THE men arrested for planning to attack Holsworthy army base came from different backgrounds.

ON a building site in Melbourne's western suburbs, an unlikely group of characters found themselves working together. Yacqub Khayre arrived in Australia from Somalia as a young boy and spoke good English, worked hard but could not communicate with his Turkish-speaking boss. Nayef El Sayed was young but had a fair share of responsibility with three children and a newborn baby. Wissam "Omar" Fattal, a former kickboxer and Muslim convert, used to complain about music played on the site because it was forbidden under Islamic law. They were all described by their boss as gentlemen who got their work done and seemed to get along.

So how did this group, along with two others, Saney Aweys and Abdirahman Ahmed - best described as a motley crew of individuals from different backgrounds and life experiences - end up being charged with conspiring to plan a terrorist attack on the Holsworthy army base in Sydney?

Seven volumes of prosecution evidence was tendered this week to the Melbourne Magistrates Court after four of the five men pleaded not guilty, waived the right to a committal hearing and were ordered to standtrial.

The fifth man, El Sayed, was not obliged to enter a plea and has reserved his right to have a committal proceeding next May.

The substantial brief - including lengthly police interviews - traces the life story of each leading up the fateful morning of the dramatic police raids that put an end to their alleged terror plot. Each is a tale of immigration and resettlement in a new country, and none is quite like the other.

Aweys, Ahmed and Khayre came as humanitarian refugees with their families from Somalia when they were children, with Khayre growing up among Italian and Greekmigrants. He cannot speak Somalian orArabic.

Fattal and El Sayed came to Australia from Lebanon, Fattal on the urging of a boxing promoter as he was a prize kickboxer and El Sayed returning here after doing one year of military service.

The group got to know each other when they started attending the Preston Mosque in Melbourne's northern suburbs.

The Australian Federal Police allege that, despite their differences, these five men were planning to die together, to launch a suicide attack on Holsworthy in which they would storm the military base and gun down as many soldiers as they could before they themselves were shot.

Aweys was said to have access to weapons. He was also said to have sought religious blessing - known as a fatwa - from a number of sheiks in Somalia to give sanction to their murderous plans.

"They want to enter into the military/forces are stationed, the barracks. Their desire to fan out and get as much as they could until they would be hit," Aweys says in one of the key conversations captured by secret AFP telephone intercepts, tendered to the court this week.

"And 20 minutes would be enough for us to take out five, six, 10 and eight - whatever Allah know ... six of them once they enter inside the location/place for about 20minutes to 30 minutes, until they will use up theirweapons."

The police also claim text messages were sent between Fattal and Khayre saying: "Please be upon you can u give the address of australian a ... And name of the train station", and three days later, Fattal received a text from a public phone box in Preston stating: "Holsworthy train station. The base is right in front of Macarthur Drive. Peace be upon you brother."

The prosecution brief includes CCTV footage of Fattal walking down from the train station the next day. He was then spotted strolling, as he later described it, to El Sayed around the boundary of Holsworthy.

Anti-terrorism investigators also claim Aweys and Ahmed were helping another man travel to Somalia to fight with the insurgence against the government.

In the thousands of pages of telephone intercept transcripts tendered to the court, Aweys appears the most. It was he who called the sheiks in search of a fatwa; he expressed disdain for Australia, including attributing the drought, the global financial crisis and the Victorian bushfires to a vengeful Allah who had come down on the country's "filthy people"; and he organised the movement ofmoney.

In his police interview, he portrays himself as having little knowledge of political struggles in his homeland. When asked by detectives why he came to Australia with his family as a refugee when he was a teenager, he simply states: "Oh the war broke out in my country, civil war. Yeah, you have seen Black Hawk Down?"

Aweys, 26, who trained as a boilermaker and has a family and four children, also plays down his interest in the conflict in Somalia. "What is the war about?" asks one investigator. "Oh just - I dunno, tribes, things, money, territory, power. Things like that."

One thing that is clear is that Aweys is devoted to his religion. He tells detectives it dictates his "family, work, eating, dressing, walking, sleeping".

"It's my life ... Everything I do, everything I am is my religion. So there's nothing like, there's nothing outside of religion. Everything is religion."

What is also clear from the audio recordings is that Khayre appears to be Aweys's protege. Despite Khayre only being a couple of years younger, their life experiences are worlds apart. Khayre arrived as a seven-year-old in 1994 with his grandparents, spending 12 months in refugee camps. He grew up with what he told police was a mixed bunch of Italians and Greeks in Melbourne's inner north. He picked up English and went to Gladstone Park High School.

"For the first couple of months we were speaking Somali but then you get the drift of the language, you know, like all your mates speak English and that is good," he says in his police interview.

Khayre, 22, never did learn again how to speak Somalian or Arabic. He carries an English Koran. "Yeah I can read it (a Somalian Koran) but I don't understand it," he tells police. "And that's why I need an English version of the Koran, yeah, like I understand it when I read it in English."

Khayre's life went downhill after he dropped out of school just before Year 12. He says he got caught up in drugs and had to live on the street while sustaining his habit of ice and marijuana.

"I just got into the clubs, you know. Got into the street culture. That led to drugs ... It was stupid stuff, if you know what I mean," he told detectives. "When I was on the streets, I wasn't praying at all ... just lost the connection. I almost died on the streets, man, you know what I mean."

Khayre tells police that converting to Islam is what saved his life. He says he got to know Aweys through the mosque and started working as an apprentice bricklayer in January this year. He quit just 1 1/2 months later, telling his boss he was going to Somalia to get married. Anti-terrorism investigators allege this was when Khayre - assisted by Aweys - went to train with the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab in Somalia as well as seeking out a fatwa and possible weapons.

His Westernised upbringing became apparent when he got to Somalia.

"How's everything man?" Aweys asks Khayre, according to intercept transcripts, "Yeah. All praise be to Allah, bro. Honestly, we are blessed but there is a bit of a culture shock, bro," Khayre tells him.

Aweys then tries to reassure his protege: "Yeah that's all right. Get used to it, man ... have patience, Allah willing. You are doing the best thing."

Khayre was not the only alleged co-conspirator to have a difference of opinion with Aweys. Ahmed argued with Aweys about the role of the UN in Somalia. He was supportive of Western assistance but Aweys was not, calling them all infidels.

Ahmed came to Australia as a refugee with his family at age 11. His father was a banker and he was studying to be a civil engineer at a Melbourne university at the time of his arrest in August.

He told detectives in his interview that his family came to this country for a better life and he planned to go back to Somalia to help reconstruct his home country.

"I believe - and you can quote me on this - that the future of Somalia lays with the people who are living in foreign countries," he says. "So doctors, you know, lawyers, engineers can take their skills back. You know, this is the people who are going to rebuild the country."

At another end of the social and cultural scale is Fattal, a 33-year-old former kickboxer from Lebanon who came to Australia on the urging of a fight promoter.

He ditched his rather successful career - including throwing out his trophies - soon after he found Islam. He became a devout follower, changing his name to Omar.

Out of the group, he is the most opinionated. His police interview is full of long diatribes taking aim at September 11, the US, Israel and how all Westerners are infidels. "Why they call us terrorists for no reason? I - I never kill in my life," he says. "Your army killer, yes ... why they kill the innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan?"

These views influenced his everyday life. He would complain about music being played on building sites, saying it was forbidden under Islam. He rented a room in an apartment in Sydney in May and completely ignored the female resident as well as trying to convert the owner to Islam.

"I have a picture of the Last Supper and a picture of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, and a set of rosary beads in the lounge room of my apartment and Omar told me that these Christian images upset him and asked me to take them down," owner Mazen Sawan told police.

Despite his brusque manner, Fattal's boss Zulkuf Yurtsever describes him as a gentle and honest man and one that he would hire again. Fattal introduced El Sayed, also from Lebanon, to Yurtsever, who took him on as abricklayer.

El Sayed, 25, who is married with four children, came out to Australia when he was a teenager, enrolling in a local high school before going back to fulfil his military service in his home country.

El Sayed was the one who took the "gentle stroll" around Holsworthy before reporting back to Fattal that he had been successful. "It's something that's very easy ... to enter the work it's easy. I went there, I strolled."

Fattal, Ahmed, Aweys and Khayre are due back in the Supreme Court for a directions hearing next month and El Sayed is set down for the committal hearing next May.

For their boss, it is a turn of events that beggars belief. "During the time that they worked for me, I never saw any of the three men get violent or angry," Yurtsever told police. "I don't want to believe that what the papers are saying could be true. It does not seem like those men at all."