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Terror suspects wanted Aus jobs
06/07/2007 07:19 - (SA)
Brisbane, Australia - Two of the doctors being held in Britain in the failed terrorist plot tried to get jobs in Australia, where a third suspect - a relative of one of the pair - was arrested last week, officials said on Friday.
The two, Sabeel Ahmed and Khalid Ahmed, were turned down by authorities in Western Australia state because their medical qualifications were not up to standard, a state official said.
None of the three foreign doctors were denied entry for security reasons, prompting questions about whether Australia's screening processes are stringent enough.
A judge late on Thursday granted police permission to hold Indian Muhammad Haneef, 27, without charge for another four days in connection with to the failed bombings in London and Scotland.
A British counterterrorism expert travelled to the northeastern city of Brisbane on Thursday to question Haneef.
Haneef was arrested on Monday as he tried to board a flight from Brisbane with a one-way ticket, believed to be to India, where his wife just had a baby.
Police have not said what role Haneef may have played in the bomb plots, but that he is being held on suspicion of having connections to a terrorist group.
Haneef came to Australia last year after getting a job at a hospital in eastern Queensland state.
'They did not meet the standard'
Geoff Dobb, the president of the Australian Medical Association in Western Australia, said Sabeel Ahmed and Khalid Ahmed had applied for jobs there since 2005.
"We checked their qualifications and references and decided that they did not meet the standard required," Dobb told The Associated Press, without elaborating.
"It had nothing to do with suspicions of any terrorist associations," he said.
Sabeel Ahmed, 26, worked at Halton Hospital in northern England, where Haneef also worked in 2005. The two men are related, Sabeel Ahmed's family in India said, without specifying exactly how.
Medical officials say thousands of foreign doctors apply every year for jobs in Australia, where there are not enough home-grown physicians.
Australian Medical Association national president Rosanna Capolingua said state governments were under extreme pressure to allow foreign doctors into Australia to fill the shortfall, and this meant the screening procedures may be too lax in some places.
"We need to have a more uniform process," Capolingua told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.
The three men are among eight people who have been detained in the British plot, in which two car bombs failed to explode in London on June 29, and two men rammed a Jeep loaded with gas cylinders into the entrance of Glasgow International Airport on June 30.
Haneef is being held under counterterrorism laws that allow police to detain a suspect without charge as long as a judge agrees there are grounds to do so.
- AP
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