NEWS > 04 August 2007

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The Australian - Sydney,Austra
04 August 2007

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Police chief on the back foot

THE shameless politicking in the Mohamed Haneef saga has diverted attention from an important and deeply troubling feature of the case: the incompetence displayed by Australia's premier counter-terrorism force, the Australian Federal Police, and the disingenuous dissembling by Commissioner Mick Keelty to cover it up.

The real scandal is not the political interference by a Government intent on keeping national security uppermost in voters' minds. It is that a police force that is supposed to be independent and above politics wrongly charged a man with an offence that could have landed him 15 years in jail, and then embarked on a strategy of blatant blame-shifting to disguise its ineptness.

The false assertion that Haneef's SIM mobile phone identity card was found in the exploded jeep at Glasgow airport was just the most glaring in a string of shocking mistakes.

This was no trivial slip. The presence of the SIM card in the burned-out vehicle was cited in court to bolster the charge that Haneef not only intentionally provided a resource to a terrorist organisation, but that that resource "would help the organisation engage (in) a terrorist act".

The source of this fallacy, made public by prosecutor Clive Porritt during a bail hearing in the Brisbane Magistrates Court, has been the subject of much public fudging. But it was not "a figment of the prosecutor's fevered imagination", as The Australian opined last week. Keelty was quick to insist it wasn't the AFP's fault:

"That error was made by the prosecutors. Whether the error was fundamental is for the court to decide."

His suggestion that the error was less than "fundamental" stretches credulity. And his claim that the mistake was "made by the prosecutors" is true only in the narrowest sense. Who do prosecutors rely on for their information? The police.

Two days after fingering the prosecutor, Keelty sought to shift the blame to the British police, revealing that Scotland Yard had initially told AFP investigators that the SIM card was found in the jeep: a crucial revelation that has been largely overlooked. It confirms that the conduit for the SIM card error was the AFP, contrary to Keelty's previous denials. Scotland Yard has since acknowledged that it did make the initial mistake but, crucially, has insisted it was corrected before Haneef was charged.

So the AFP knew that the SIM card was not in the jeep when it charged Haneef. And it knew the prosecutor was wrong when he addressed the court on Saturday, July 14. The AFP could have corrected this two hours later when the court resumed. Or two days later, when Haneef reappeared and was granted bail. But it made no attempt to do so for six days, until the ABC's Raphael Epstein broke the story on July 20 that the SIM card had in fact been recovered 300km away in Liverpool. Keelty's belated explanation that "the prosecutor made an oral submission that was incorrect" was a poor and only half-true excuse.

On Tuesday, Keelty revived this falsehood with a bewildering series of comments that are totally at odds with the known facts.

"For all that's been said about the SIM card, the SIM card is still in the vicinity of London at the time that the devices were attempted to be exploded," he said.

"The SIM card is still at Glasgow, at the airport at the time that the attempted bombing happened there."

An AFP spokesman attempted vainly to make sense of Keelty's gaffe, explaining that the commissioner had intended to say the SIM card was linked to people who were in the vicinity of the attempted bombings.

It is inconceivable that Keelty would not know by now exactly where the SIM card was found. His garbled commentary, along with his subsequent attempt to talk up a dodgy Indian "dossier" referring to Haneef having "alleged links with al-Qa'ida" - a claim the Bangalore deputy police commissioner has since described as "incorrect and false" - only undermines the AFP's credibility further.

The AFP's submission to the bail hearing also exaggerated the case against Haneef, stating that he "was attempting to depart Australia before authorities could become aware of his involvement in the above terrorist acts". There was and is no such evidence.

Another police affidavit contained errors of fact, stating that Haneef had told the AFP he shared a house in Liverpool with his second cousins, Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed, when in fact he had told them he lived with a group of other doctors and moved out of the house before Sabeel Ahmed moved in. He never lived with Kafeel Ahmed at all, but made two brief visits to his home at Cambridge in 2004.

This misinformation was repeated in an issues paper prepared for Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, which stated that Haneef had "advised the AFP that he resided with Dr Sabeel Ahmed" in Liverpool. Like the falsehood over the SIM card, the error was allowed to stand until it was exposed by The Australian's Hedley Thomas on July 20. The AFP has offered no explanation or apology for this mistake, or for its inexcusable failure to correct it.

Asked to explain this at last Friday's joint press conference with the commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions Damian Bugg, Keelty replied: "We don't deliberately provide wrong information. We provide the information that's provided to us by the UK."

His answer was incorrect and misleading. The information concerned was not provided by Britain; it was given by Haneef himself to the AFP, who misrepresented it in their affidavit.

From the day of Haneef's detention, Keelty provided a running public commentary on the case. When doubts were raised about the SIM card, he assured us that police had relied on "a lot more" than mobile phone records. Later he told us "it is quite a complex investigation and the links to the UK are becoming more concrete".

Yet two days after the raid on Haneef's apartment, its owners were allowed in to clean it out before a full forensic examination had been conducted, ensuring that if there ever was any forensic evidence, it would likely have been destroyed.

The presumption of innocence appeared to be a low priority for the police. Haneef's colleagues at the Gold Coast Hospital recounted the day after his detention that police had told them Haneef "may have been part of a terrorist sleeper cell". In the resulting climate of public alarm, the AFP sought and obtained a series of extensions to the time it was allowed to question Haneef, in the first test of the amended terrorism laws that allow prolonged detention without charge.

Last week, as the case began collapsing, Keelty's eagerness to take credit for it suddenly evaporated. "Nothing the AFP has done has been done without the advice of the DPP," he announced.

When the charges were sensationally dropped last Friday, Keelty made sure the DPP took the blame, insisting that the decision to charge Haneef had been made on the prosecutor's advice, and therefore "we were obliged to charge him". Once again this was only partly true. The DPP's advice on whether a charge can be supported is based on the evidence put to it by the police. Keelty's assertion that "the facts that the AFP or the investigation have put before the court were correct" is simply wrong.

According to Keelty, everyone is to blame for this debacle except the AFP. He blamed Haneef for trying to leave the country. He blamed barrister Stephen Keim for leaking the police record of interview. He blamed journalists who "made it extraordinarily difficult for us to continue the investigation while questions were being put to us by the media in a way that I've never witnessed before." Publicly he said: "You can't blame Andrews; he acted on our information." But privately he briefed journalists that he was furious with Andrews for complicating and inflaming the case by cancelling Haneef's visa.

Only the AFP is blameless, by Keelty's account. "The police investigation has been thorough, I make no apology for that, nor should I in a terrorism investigation in this country. We have done our job well in this instance, we have done our job professionally."

This is pure wishful thinking. A more persuasive assessment is that of former National Crime Authority chief Peter Faris that the AFP has demonstrated "monumental incompetence" and looks "way out of its depth".

Terrorism indeed poses a serious threat and many dedicated police officers have worked long and hard on this unfortunate case. But none of this makes the AFP immune from being held to account for its mistakes.

Keelty has placed himself and his police force on the front line of the Government's highly politicised war on terror, and has eagerly reaped the public kudos and increased resources this has brought. Now that his strategy has backfired so badly, Keelty only has himself to blame.

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Article sourced from

The Australian - Sydney,Austra04 August 2007

Police chief on the back foot

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The Australian - Sydney,Austra
04 August 2007