A Pakistan-born Australian architect was jailed for 20 years on Wednesday for planning bomb attacks in Sydney, a court official said.
Pakistan-born Faheem Khalid Lodhi had planned to detonate home-made bombs in Australia’s largest city as part of a ”holy war”, the New South Wales Supreme Court was told during his trial.
Prosecutors told the court police had found what amounted to a terrorism manual when they raided his home in October 2003.
Supreme Court Judge Anthony Whealy on Wednesday sentenced 36-year-old Lodhi to a maximum 20 years jail, with a minimum of 15 years to be served, a court official told Reuters.
A Supreme Court jury found Lodhi guilty in June on three charges — collecting maps of Sydney’s electricity grid, acting in preparation for a terrorist act by gathering information about bomb-making and possessing documents with information about how to manufacture poisons.
Lodhi was acquitted on a fourth charge of downloading aerial photographs of defence facilities from the internet.
Lodhi told the court during his trial that he was not a violent religious fanatic and his lawyers said he had the defence photographs because he had worked as an architect at the sites.
Lodhi, who emigrated to Australia in 1996, was charged under tough new anti-terrorism laws introduced soon after the September 11 2001, attacks on the United States.
The first Australian jailed under the tough new anti-terrorism laws had his conviction quashed last Friday when an appeal court ruled a police interview given while under arrest in Pakistan was not voluntary and therefore inadmissible.
Joseph Terrence Thomas had been jailed for five years after he was found guilty in April of receiving $3 500 and a plane ticket from senior al-Qaeda agent Khaled bin Attash after training with Osama bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan in 2001.
The Victorian state Supreme Court of Appeal has yet to decide whether Thomas will face a retrial or be acquitted.
Australia is a staunch US ally with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan but has never suffered a major peacetime attack on home soil. – Reuters