By Neena Bhandari, IANS
Sydney : Fresh details have emerged in the case of Muhammad Haneef, the Indian doctor charged in connection with the failed UK bomb attacks.
The mobile phone SIM card belonging to Haneef was actually seized by the police eight hours after the jeep crashed in the Glasgow airport, when Haneef's cousin Sabeel Ahmed was arrested in Liverpool, sources in the UK and Australia have told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
A Brisbane court was told on July 13 that a mobile phone SIM card belonging to Haneef was found in the Jeep that crashed into Glasgow Airport on June 30 in which his second cousin Kafeel Ahmed had suffered 90 per cent burns.
The 27-year-old Indian doctor has been charged under the Australian counter-terrorism laws with supporting a terrorist organisation by "recklessly" giving his mobile phone SIM card to people planning the UK bomb attacks.
Haneef has admitted to giving the SIM card to his second cousin Sabeel Ahmed, the third person charged in the botched British bombings, so that the latter could take advantage of an "extra minute deal" offered by provider O2.
Haneef's lawyer Peter Russo told ABC radio, "The only way that we're ever going to prove whether that's true or not, will be in an open hearing and the first opportunity we may get to do that will be on August 8. All I can do is just keep working hard and hopefully the process will unfold and the truth will be found somewhere in the unfolding of the different court hearings that we have."
According to reports, Ahmed allegedly had two phones on him at the time of his arrest, one of which contained Haneef's SIM card. Sabeel Ahmed has been charged with having information that could have prevented an act of terrorism. He is accused of having had information which he "knew or believed may be of material assistance in preventing the commission by another [person] of an act of terrorism."
Meanwhile, Haneef remains in solitary confinement at Wolston Correctional Centre in Brisbane's south-west after failing to post the AU$10,000 bail surety. If the bail conditions were met, he would have been moved to the Villawood immigration detention centre in Sydney following the cancellation of his 457 work visa by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship.