BANGALORE, India, 3 August 2007 — A senior Indian police officer yesterday dismissed as false a report that Indian doctor detained in Australia had links with Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.
Australia’s SBS television late Wednesday said it had obtained an unsigned and undated “dossier,” apparently compiled by the Bangalore police, which appeared to suggest Mohamed Haneef had “alleged links” with Al-Qaeda.
“It’s not true,” said Gopal Hosur, joint commissioner of police in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, Haneef’s hometown. The Bangalore police’s role had been limited to conducting a “preliminary inquiry” into the background of Haneef, 27, who returned home Sunday night after more than three weeks of detention in Australia, said Hosur.
The police “found nothing incriminating” against the doctor, said Hosur, who has led local investigations into the role of three Bangalore-based Indians suspected in the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow in late June.
No one answered the phone at Haneef’s house yesterday. He said Wednesday he wouldn’t comment on any new allegations until his case for the reinstatement of his work visa in Australia was heard by a court there on Aug. 8.
Haneef returned home after Australian police dropped charges that he had “recklessly” supported the car bombing plot by giving his mobile-phone SIM card to one of two cousins implicated in the conspiracy.
Australian police chief Mick Keelty said earlier yesterday that he had not heard of allegations of Al-Qaeda links against Haneef — who was freed from custody on Friday after charges against him collapsed — but said they should be investigated.
“We don’t have anything that positively says that but of course it is an avenue of inquiry and if that is what the Indians are saying it needs to be followed through,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“It emphasizes the fact that this is an ongoing investigation, there are a lot of avenues of inquiry that are still to be followed through,” he added.
SBS’s Dateline program showed a four-page document, which it said it had obtained from a senior Indian policeman in Bangalore. Under the heading “Organizational set up,” it contained the phrase “alleged links with Al-Qaeda.” Haneef’s lawyer Peter Russo told the ABC from India that the claims were “simply untrue” and that they had never been put to Haneef either during his detention in Australia or back in India.
