Three jailed for army base terror plot

THREE Islamic extremists who plotted to launch a suicide terror attack on a Sydney army base have been jailed for 18 years.

Terror trial

THREE men convicted of a terror plot to launch a suicide attack again Sydney's Holsworthy army barracks have been sentenced in the Victorian Supreme Court to 18 years in jail, with a minimum of 13 years and six months.

One of the men, Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, was escorted from the court before Justice Betty King could deliver her sentence, yelling out “this is corruption,” and ranting about “what the Jew has done” in Palestine.

The three accused were greeted warmly as they entered the court by friends and family in the public gallery.

But in handing down sentences today, Justice King said the three men - Fattal, 35, Saney Edow Aweys, 28, and Nayef El Sayed, 27 - had hatched plans which were “evil” and “deadly serious.”

She said the planned attack on the Holsworthy army base would have been “a totally horrific event if it ever came to pass”.

“Your plans were evil....a random shooting of anyone found on that army base.”

Justice King said the accused should “hang your heads in shame” that this was the way they planned to repay a country which had nurtured them.

She said that in determining her sentence she had to take into account the fact that the accused had shown no sign of retreating from their extremist beliefs and as such they remained a danger to the community.

Justice King said Fattal, of Lebanese descent, was by any account an `intolerant muslim” who held rigid and extremist views and had an “inability to control himself.” He considered that all Australians and the Australian government were effectively at war with Muslims around the world and was fiercely opposed to Australian military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

She said El Sayed was secretly an extremist who presented himself to others as a charitable character. She said it was “hard to believe” that his “strongly-held hateful views” could just disappear.

The three men were convicted in December last year of conspiring to plan a terrorist attack.

Two alleged co-conspirators, Abdirahman Ahmed and Yacqub Khayre were found not guilty.

During the trial the court heard that the men planned to buy automatic weapons to attack the Holsworthy base, killing as many soldiers as possible before being killed themselves.

Prosecutors alleged the group's motivation was their anger at what they regarded as the wrongful jailing in a previous trial of a group of seven Muslim men of terrorism charges.

The court also heard that the accused were angry about the deployment of Australian troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was alleged that they sought a fatwa for the attack from religious clerics in somalia.

Fattal was the most belligerent of the accused during the trial, sometimes refusing to stand up for the judge. When found guilty last year, he addressed the jury proclaiming Islam as the true religion.

A former kickboxer, Fattal was born in Lebanon and arrived in Australia in about 2003. The court heard that he wanted to die a martyr's death.

Aweys, a father of four, was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1983, arriving in Australia in 1998 when he was 15. The court heard that Aweys had described Australians as infidels and that he saw Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires as a punishment from Allah.

El Sayed was the one of those convicted to be born in Melbourne.

The men were arrested in pre-dawn raids in Melbourne on August 4, 2009 as part of the country's second largest counter-terror invetigation, known as Operation Neath.

The Australian learned of the planned raids in the week before but held the story at the request of the Australian Federal Police, eventually going to press with the AFP's permission on the morning of the raids.