Australian told family about 'lovely' Bin Laden, court hears

Taliban foot soldier David Hicks described Osama bin Laden as “lovely” and trained with al-Qaida a month before the 9/11attacks on the US, police told an Australian court today.

The Australian Federal Police have applied to a court in Adelaide for an order to restrict the movements of Hicks – a convicted al-Qaida supporter and former inmate at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – once he is released from an Adelaide prison on December 29.

Police have yet to explain what conditions they want in the so-called control order, but these could include a curfew and curbs on who he can contact and what type of telecommunications equipment he can use.

If granted, it would be only the second control order granted in Australia.

Lawyers for Hicks, a 32-year-old former kangaroo skinner, told the Federal Magistrates Court they would not oppose such an order but would contest some aspects of it.

Police lawyer Andrew Berger said Hicks had admitted taking part in four al-Qaida training camps between January 2001 and August 2001.

Berger also detailed letters from Hicks to his family in Adelaide during 2001.

He said that in a May 2001 letter, Hicks wrote: “By the way, I have met Osama bin Laden 20 times now, lovely brother, everything for the cause of Islam.”

“The only reason the West calls him the most wanted Muslim is because he’s got the money to take action,” Hicks wrote.

Hicks admitted he attended al-Qaida training camps in Pakistan in an interview with Australian police in May 2002 while he was a prisoner at the US naval base at Cuba.

Hicks undertook “substantial training” in basic arms and combat, guerrilla warfare and advanced marksmanship, Berger told the court.

“It was a systematic and sustained attempt to seek out training,” Berger said.

“This is not a man who was full of hot air,” he added.

A US military commission in March this year sentenced Hicks to seven years in prison, with all but nine months suspended after he pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism.

Under a plea bargain, Hicks was returned to Australia to serve the remainder of his sentence at Yatala Prison.

The father of two was captured in December 2001 by the US-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, where he had been fighting with the Taliban, and spent more than five years without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

Australia’s first control order was imposed last year on Melbourne man Jack Thomas, who is facing a retrial on terror-related charges.

Australia’s High Court in August dismissed a constitutional challenge by Thomas to the validity of the control order legislation.