Radical group faces ban

The Australian
Natalie O'Brien and Peter Wilson
July 07, 2007

ATTORNEY-General Philip Ruddock will ask security agencies to reinvestigate the radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir after revelations that the British men arrested over the foiled car bomb plot were closely linked to members of the group in London.
Mr Ruddock said yesterday he would pass on "any information that comes to my attention about organisations where it is suggested that consideration should be given to proscription" to Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty as well as relevant organisations.

The test of whether a group should be banned was "not embarked upon lightly", Mr Ruddock said. "It's one in which I must be satisfied, on advice, that the organisation is directly or indirectly engaged in preparing, planning or assisting, or fostering a terrorist act."

Mr Ruddock's comments came as Commissioner Keelty revealed that officers were searching through 31,000 documents in relation to the British terror attacks, and had spread their investigation to Western Australia.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, which claims to have about 200 Australian members, has been previously criticised by John Howard and twice investigated by ASIO.

Its radical agenda has prompted NSW Premier Morris Iemma to call for it to be proscribed.

Mr Ruddock said in the past that there had not been enough evidence to designate it as a terrorist organisation.

Four of the seven London suspects, including the two men who rammed a car into a terminal building at Glasgow Airport last Saturday, spent time working or studying in the university town of Cambridge, where some of them socialised and prayed with members of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Bilal Abdulla, the 27-year-old passenger in the car, fellow doctor Mohammed Asha, 26, and his wife, Dana, worked together at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge in 2005.

Kafeel Ahmed, the driver of the car at the airport who is now in a Glasgow hospital close to death with major burns, studied as an engineer at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge at that time and is now believed to have made the group's failed bombs.

Dr Ahmed's brother Sabeel, who was arrested in Liverpool, visited him in Cambridge and met his friends there. The Ahmeds are cousins of Mohamed Haneef, who was seized at Brisbane airport on Monday night.


Hizb ut-Tahrir has been banned in Europe, China and Saudi Arabia but is active in Britain and Australia, advocating the establishment of an international caliphate, or Muslim government, to run countries with a majority Muslim population under sharia, Islamic law.


A spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain last night denied that those arrested over the London and Glasgow attacks had been members of the group.


But Shiraz Maher, a former Hizb ut-Tahir member, told the BBC's Newsnight program that the men seized at Glasgow airport shared Hizb ut-Tahrir's main ideals and actively associated with its members in Cambridge.


Other ex-members of Hizb ut-Tahrir have accused the group of inciting violence among its supporters, and of grooming them as terrorists.


One disaffected member in Britain, Ed Husain, has told The Weekend Australian that Hizb ut-Tahrir often deliberately withheld formal membership from some of its associates so it could deny that they were members if they were to get into trouble with the law.


British Opposition Leader David Cameron this week demanded that the Brown Government ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, saying it "was poisoning the minds of young people and has said that Jews should be killed wherever they are found".


Mr Maher said that when he was active in Hizb ut-Tahrir in Cambridge, he was a personal friend of both Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed.


Hizb ut-Tahrir has been described as a "warm-up track" for terrorists, and a threat to Australia.


Research has found that the group takes advantage of Australian tolerance to launch propaganda attacks on the country and that its adherents are primed to take the next step to jihad, if called upon to do so.


The propaganda of the group encourages a level of religious hatred that could convince its followers to carry out terrorist acts, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.


A paper released earlier this year by the think-tank's Anthony Bergin and Jacob Townsend said that although Hizb ut-Tahrir did not advocate the use of terror, it used the same radical terminology as al-Qa'ida.


The paper warned that the group's Australian operations needed to be closely monitored and could be a "warm-up track for violent radicals".


"Hizb ut-Tahrir advocates a revolutionary change to our social and political system," the paper said. "It encourages indirectly and sometimes more directly political violence by its inciting propaganda.


"It uses Australian tolerance to promote radical propaganda even against Australia itself."


The group held a conference in Sydney in late December and early January calling for all Muslims in Australia to work towards forming a pan-global Islamic state. The meeting featured controversial Indonesian cleric Ismail Yusanto as a speaker.


Additional reporting: Selina Mitchell, Sanna Trad