SYDNEY, June 10: Two Australian men, one a former Qantas baggage handler and the other a Sydney architect, were ordered to stand trial on separate terrorism charges on Friday, court officials said.
Pakistan-born architect Faheem Khalid Lodhi, 34, was ordered to stand trial on July 1 on nine terror charges, which included planning to carry out a terrorist act ‘involving the bombing of one or more establishments” in Sydney.
The prosecution told Sydney’s Central Local Court during his committal hearing that Mr Lodhi returned to Australia in 2003 from a camp in Pakistan run by the banned Lashkar-i-Taiba with plans for a terrorist attack.
When arrested in April last year, Mr Lodhi had maps of Australia’s national electricity network, aerial photographs of defence sites in Sydney and instructions for making explosives, prosecutor Richard Maidment told the court.
Mr Lodhi has pleaded not guilty and will face trial in the New South Wales (state) Supreme Court on July 1, an official at Sydney’s Central Local Court said.
The state government has ordered maximum security for Mr Lodhi in prison while he awaits his trial. His food will be specially prepared and his telephone calls, mail and visits monitored.
SECOND TRIAL: Former Qantas baggage handler Bilal Khazal, 35, was also ordered to stand trial on Friday on separate terrorism charges.
Mr Khazal, already convicted in absentia and sentenced to 10 years in jail in Lebanon for terrorism-related offences, is charged with compiling a ‘terrorist manual’ from articles on the Internet.
But Mr Khazal’s lawyer told the court the manual was only about terrorism and his client did not instruct people to commit terror acts. He also said Mr Khazal had written only a couple of pages and the rest was readily available on the Internet.—Reuters
