Medic was nothing out of the ordinary

THE double bed in the sparsely furnished main room had been neatly made. In the kitchen the dishes from his last meal were lying in the sink, unwashed. There were few clues to a hasty exit.

THE double bed in the sparsely furnished main room had been neatly made. In the kitchen the dishes from his last meal were lying in the sink, unwashed. There were few clues to a hasty exit.

But when AFP agents with search warrants rushed at 7.50am yesterday to a Gold Coast unit rented by Mohamed Haneef, an ethnic Indian Muslim at the Australian end of a fast-moving counter-terror investigation, Police Commissioner Mick Keelty was already well aware of the movements of the globetrotting medical practitioner.

Hours earlier on Monday night, officers had swooped on Dr Haneef as he waited at Brisbane's International Airport with a one-way ticket to India, via Kuala Lumpur. He was arrested with a minimum of fuss; few passengers on Malaysian Airlines Flight 140 would have noticed the low-key apprehension despite their flight being delayed until 1am.

But as Premier Peter Beattie visited Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital yesterday, urgent telephone calls by federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, who was being briefed by Mr Keelty, relayed the news: Dr Haneef was being held on the advice of British counter-terror authorities investigating the near-bombings, allegedly by Muslim doctors, in Glasgow and London last week.

Sources in the Gold Coast Hospital were adamant yesterday that Dr Haneef and his friend and colleague, Mohammed Asif Ali, who was also being questioned by Australian Federal Police yesterday, were quietly spoken, diligent "model doctors". They had good references, an unremarkable education and practice history in India and Liverpool, and had done nothing at the Gold Coast Hospital in Southport to raise concerns about their clinical ability or their ideology.

Which is why Steve Bosher, affable owner of the Telesto Place unit No15 rented by Dr Haneef for $250 a week, was stunned when officers turned up with steely determination and search warrants.

"It mentioned that the reason for the issue of the warrant concerned terrorism incidents in Glasgow and London," Mr Bosher told The Australian. "There were two pages listing the things the police wanted to secure. I took them up to the room they nominated that was rented by Dr Haneef and they had their own key.

"They said I could not go in at first, and I suppose they checked then for anything dangerous.

"After a short while they insisted I come in and witness everything they took. It was just a great lot of papers and computer disks," Mr Bosher said.

"I last saw him on Friday when he asked if I could get his dishwasher fixed. When I went to do it on the Saturday, he didn't answer, which is nothing unusual in this sort of place.

"The police took a lot of papers and the disks. They appeared to be more interested in what was written on the documents - like telephone numbers written on the backs of paper and so on.

"The laptop computer that the tenant had was not there. It didn't look like he had left in a hurry. It gave every indication he intended to return and was not going for good. His rent was paid up. He has never had a television set but there is broadband connected for his computer."

Mr Bosher described Dr Haneef as a quiet person and a good tenant who had never caused any trouble since arriving in the Gold Coast in September.

"Although he had to walk past our office every time he came and went, he always paid his rent in advance on the internet," Mr Bosher said. "There were never any noisy parties or complaints by the other tenants."

A neighbour said she had seen another Indian man with Dr Haneef regularly in recent times, most recently on Sunday night, when the two went into his room together. When Dr Haneef first took the unit, he was accompanied by a "pretty young Muslim woman who always wore a burka but with her face uncovered", Mr Bosher said. "She stayed a couple of months - we assumed it was his wife or partner - but she has not been with him for a good while now," he said.

Although Dr Haneef was paid more than $70,000 a year by Queensland Health, he lived frugally in the unit.

He had bought a cheap lounge suite, a small dining table, a couple of chairs and little else in the way of furniture.

He drove a recent-model, dark metallic-blue Honda Jazz, and his unit was about a 15-minute stroll from the Southport broadwater and the beach.

Federal police returned twice more to the unit during the day and took away documents.

Meryl Bosher said the only real conversation she had with Dr Haneef was once when he came in "quite perturbed" because he thought he had seen a snake in the garden.

Less than 300m down the road is the set of units where Dr Haneef's colleague, Mohammed Asif Ali, lives. No charges have been laid against either man.