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Gold Coast doctor arrested over UK bomb plot

Brisbane arrest:

Related Story: British police investigate hospital terrorist cell

A 27-year-old foreign doctor who has been working as a registrar at the Gold Coast Hospital has been arrested in Brisbane in connection with the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow.

The man was arrested at Brisbane International Airport last night and a number of search warrants, including one at the hospital, have been executed across south-east Queensland.

The arrest came as reports from the UK said as many as six doctors with links to UK hospitals had been arrested in connection with the attempted attacks over the weekend.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said he believed the man was an Australian resident.
Reports earlier said the man had been arrested as he tried to board a flight to Singapore.

Australia's level of terrorist threat remains at medium.

"Queenslanders, I just want to say, need to be calm about this," Queensland Premier Peter Beattie said. "We are not aware of any threat to any building or any activity in Queensland at all."

Mr Beattie said the arrest had been made by a joint Australian Federal Police and Queensland Police counter-terrorism taskforce, acting on information from UK authorities.

Mr Ruddock says the man has not been charged but is "helping police with their enquiries".

Earlier British police confirmed that an eighth suspect had been arrested but would only say the person was detained at an "undisclosed location."

British newspapers are reporting that as many as six of the eight people arrested over the failed car bomb attacks are doctors who may have planned the attacks while living in medical residences at a Scottish hospital.

One of the men arrested in Britain straight after the attack on Glasgow Airport has been named as Bilal Abdullah, a doctor from Iraq who qualified in Baghdad in 2004.

Mohammed Asha, 26, a Palestinian doctor who qualified in Jordan, also in 2004, was arrested with his wife on Saturday evening when unmarked police cars blocked a motorway in northern England to stop their car.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/03/1968224.htm

Related:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22009071-2,00.html

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Study shows Australia home for radical Islam
Mon Jul 2, 2007 6:39AM BST
By Rob Taylor

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia has a bigger portion of Muslim youths at risk of turning to radical Islam than any other Western nation, with up to 3,000 in "ideological sleeper cells" in Sydney alone, a government-backed study said on Monday.

Between 2,000 and 3,000 youths, or about 1 percent of Sydney's 200,000-strong Muslim population, had already been targeted by radical Islamic teachers, with some at risk of making the jump to militancy, the research said.

"The radical teaching base here is relatively stronger than you might expect it to be in the UK, the Middle East or the U.S.," study author Mustapha Kara-Ali told Reuters.

"The youth community here is vulnerable and could be acted upon for recruitment and further radicalisation."

Australia has around 340,000 Muslims, or around 1.6 percent of the 21 million population.

But the percentage of radicalised Muslim youths was bigger than the United States or the UK, where the ideological pool was of similar size, but off a 1.6 million base, Kara-Ali said.

Kara-Ali, a member of Prime Minister John Howard's Muslim advisory board, said it was far harder for radicals to spread an extremist message in other countries, where moderate groups were well placed to resist their message.

"The Muslim community is relatively new in Australia. Given that, there isn't an established moderate Islamic order with deep roots in the community and the extremists are exploiting this," he said. Continued...