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Thursday 23 December 2010

Three guilty of plotting Sydney army base attack

Australian police search car in Melbourne suburb (file image from August 2009) Police carried out raids on 19 locations across Melbourne in August 2009

Three men have been found guilty of plotting a suicide attack on an army base in the Australian city of Sydney.

A Melbourne court found three of the accused men guilty of conspiring to commit a terrorist act. The other two defendants were acquitted.

The five men, all Australian citizens with Somali or Lebanese origins, were accused of targeting Sydney's Holsworthy military base.

Police said the attack would have been the worst in Australian history.

The men were arrested in Melbourne in August 2009.

Afghan war

Officials said the men, some of whom had links to Somali-based militant groups, were motivated by a belief that Islam was under attack from the West.

They said they planned to send a group of men armed with automatic rifles into the base and planned to keep on shooting until they were killed.

The prosecution said that the plot was hatched between February and 4 August last year, when the five were arrested in a swoop involving hundreds of police.

Chief prosecutor Nick Robinson said that one of the accused had visited Somalia to seek a fatwa - or religious decree - for the attack, adding they had condemned Australia's involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

The trial began in September and the jury deliberated for more than five days before returning guilty verdicts against Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, 34, Saney Edow Aweys, 27, and Nayef El Sayed, 26.

According to a transcript read to the court, Fattal told undercover police: "If I find way to kill the army, I swear to Allah the great I'm going to do it."

As he left the courtroom, Fattal told the jury: "Islam is truth religion. Thank you very much."

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