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'Osama wants a white boy'
27/02/2006 10:22 - (SA)
Sydney - An Australian convert to Islam convicted of receiving funds from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network has told how his search for the meaning of life led him to the terror training camps of Afghanistan.
Joseph Thomas, 32, known as "Jihad Jack", was an Anglican, a teenage ballet dancer, a musician in a punk band and a taxi-driver before finding himself sought after as "a white boy" agent for the world's most wanted man.
Details of the fresh-faced Thomas's strange odyssey were revealed in a series of interviews carried out by The Age newspaper ahead of his trial and published on Monday, a day after his conviction.
A jury found Thomas guilty of receiving $3 500 and an air ticket from Pakistan to Australia from al-Qaeda, but acquitted him on two counts of providing resources or support for a terrorist attack.
He faces a maximum of 25 years in jail and is being held in custody ahead of a pre-sentencing hearing on Thursday.
"I might be naive and I might be an idealist, but I am not a dickhead who will help to hurt innocent people," he told the newspaper in interviews where he was sometimes accompanied by his mother, a nurse.
His father is a retired schoolteacher. Both parents, along with his Indonesian wife and three young children, have stood steadfastly beside Thomas since his arrest in November 2004.
"I am a fifth-generation Australian - 105 years Irish-Australian. The offer to come home and be a sleeper agent where my family live is totally ridiculous."
His mother Patsy said Thomas had always explored religion, looking for answers to his existence.
"He has always been trying to find himself and find where he fits."
Thomas told The Age that while raised as an Anglican he could not reconcile the fact that the church was founded, as he put it, by a king with venereal disease who created his own religion of convenience.
He explored occultism and Buddhism before converting to Islam, changing his name by deed poll to Jihad (Holy War) and heading for Afghanistan in March 2001 to seek the ideal Islamic society under the country's former Taliban rulers.
He volunteered for military training to help the hardline Islamists fight a civil war, ending up in the al-Farooq camp, where he said Bin Laden was a regular visitor.
Thomas spent one week on the frontline, but saw no combat, before the September 11 attacks on the United States. When the Taliban collapsed under the US-led invasion later that year, Thomas fled to Pakistan.
There he lived in hiding in safe houses for 13 months before being detained by the Pakistani authorities in January 2003 and held for almost five months.
Thomas said he was choked and suffocated while being interrogated by Pakistanis and American CIA agents demanding to know when the next attack would be.
"An American, Joe, told me: 'We have a new machine and I love the sound when we twist their testicles'," Thomas said.
"I don't think I will ever be the same person. I came back a scared rabbit. I wake up at night in cold sweats."
Thomas said that after his release without charge he was given $3 500 and air ticket home from an associate of Bin Laden's called Khaled bin Attash, who had told him: "Osama wants a white boy."
Thomas said that while bin Attash had asked him prepare for an attack, he accepted the money and plane ticket simply because he wanted to return home to his family and had no intention of becoming an al-Qaeda operative.
He said he remains a devout Muslim but now understands that international conflict was "never about religion - people just use it".
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