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| Down Under |
| Australia home to 50 suspected terrorists |
| 2006-04-19 |
| A terrorism expert says Australia is home to at least 50 suspected terrorists - five times the number questioned by ASIO last year. The claim came as an audit of the terrorist threat in Britain by intelligence agency MI5, conducted after the July 2005 London bombings, revealed there were an estimated 400 al-Qaeda terrorist suspects in the country. Media reports quoted British officials as saying the 400 include a hard core of between 40 and 60 trained fighters with the capability and the intention to carry out attacks, as well as Islamic extremists on the fringes who could become active at any point. Australian National University terrorism expert Clive Williams said the figure for Australia was likely to be about 50. ASIO questioned only 10 terror suspects under warrant in 2004-05, according to its most recent annual report. "I would say the figure is somewhere around the 50 mark," Dr Williams told AAP. "A friend of mine (in a spy agency) went through the same thought process and came up with the same figure. "These are people who have been overseas and come back, or are of interest and we don't know where they have been, or there are suspicions about their travel and they had contact (with terror groups) previously. "So there's a range of reasons why people would end up on the list." He said some suspects could also have shown up on telephone records or be related to people who had been arrested on terrorism charges. Dr Williams said the high number created a problem for spy agencies such as ASIO. "You can't maintain surveillance on that number of people, because you need eight people to do a continuous surveillance and lots of resources and no one's got that kind of resources," he said. "That's why control orders are desirable from the point of view of trying to track people." New terror laws allow police and spies to seek control orders of up to 12 months on terror suspects, which could include electronic shackles or geographical limits on their movement. The British report also said MI5 had started developing a map of terror hotspots. But Dr Williams said he did not believe Australian intelligence agencies used such maps. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |