Mohamed Haneef was so upset with being detained for questioning over a relative's terrorist attack in Britain, he is begging to come back.
A fully trained doctor, he is unemployed in India, where the health care needs of the local population are clearly met by others.
What a sweet, giveing guy. Let us hope he stays in India, and gets arrested if it is found he participated with the terrorist hit.
Jobless Haneef wants to return
ReplyDeletefrom news.com.au
THREE months on from returning to Bangalore after a terrorism charge against him was dropped in Australia, Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef is unemployed.
Despite his ordeal in spending four weeks behind bars before the case against him collapsed, the former Gold Coast Hospital registrar is determined to regain his Australian visa so he can return to work here.
Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews cancelled Dr Haneef's visa on July 16 just hours after a Brisbane magistrate freed him on bail, finding the prosecution case against him was weak.
Federal Court judge Jeffrey Spender ruled in August that Mr Andrews had made a "jurisdictional error" in revoking Dr Haneef's visa on character grounds. Mr Andrews is appealing against the decision.
In an interview with ABC TV's Four Corners program tonight, Dr Haneef said he was determined to regain his visa so he could resume studies and work abroad.
"The prospect, you know, of going abroad for further studies anywhere in the world or to work for any other institution in the world or attending any conference, anything like that, it all depends on on me having a clear record," he said.
"I don't have a job at this time and I'm just relying on my ... savings and what I've done."
Before the case against him fell apart, police alleged Dr Haneef acted recklessly by giving a SIM card to his second cousin, Sabeel Ahmed, whom British police had charged with withholding information about a terrorist attack.
Sabeel's brother, Kafeel Ahmed, had been at the wheel of a blazing jeep that crashed into Glasgow airport on June 30, a day after a bomb plot was foiled in London.
In the interview, Dr Haneef said he had not been trying to abscond from Australia when he tried to leave Brisbane on a one-way ticket to India on July 2.
"If I were to be absconding I wouldn't have told the hospital - they have all the details with them, they have ... my home phone number, they have my address and ... I was travelling with my documents with me and I had all my proofs, I was not in a false identity going out leaving the country."
He said he had been short of money and had asked his father-in-law to book him a ticket home to see his wife and newborn baby, without specifying whether he wanted a return ticket.
Dr Haneef said Sabeel's mother had alerted him to an issue with the SIM card he had lent Sabeel in 2006 and he had tried unsuccessfully to contact British police about it.
When he was unable to get in touch with British police, he figured he would go ahead with his plans to return to India.
Dr Haneef said he had visited Kafeel Ahmed twice at Cambridge, "but I have never come across any radical thoughts or any extremist ideas of such kind from him".
He was unaware of Kafeel's activism in politics surrounding the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya, he said.