SYDNEY, 21 March 2004 — Attorney General Philip Ruddock said yesterday he could not rule out the possibility that Osama Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, visited Australia on a recruiting drive in the 1990s.
Ruddock said he could not verify a claim by Pakistani journalist and Bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir that Al-Zawahiri visited Australia while he was in the process of setting up a global terrorism network.
He said there were no records of Al-Zawahiri visiting Australia under his own name or any of his known aliases.
“That doesn’t mean to say that he may not have come under some other false documentation or some other alias that’s not known to us,” he told ABC radio.
Ruddock said Australia was clearly “of interest to Al-Qaeda”. Mir told ABC television in an interview to be screened tomorrow that Al-Zawahiri claimed to have entered Australia on a false passport.
“He told me that in the early 90s he traveled to New Zealand, he was there to meet some of his people, then he came to Australia, then from Australia he went to Indonesia,” Mir said.
“In those days, in early 1996 he was on a mission to organize his network all over the world.”
Al-Zawahiri is the subject of an intense manhunt in Pakistan’s border district of South Waziristan, where officials believe he may be surrounded. Al-Qaeda leaders reportedly insist he is safe in Afghanistan.
