Australian police arrest Indian doctor in British terror plot

A senior British police officer was traveling to Australia Wednesday to question an Indian doctor arrested in connection with the failed terrorist attacks in Britain, Australia's prime minister said.

Australian police arrested Muhammad Haneef, 27, at the international airport in the eastern city of Brisbane as he tried to leave the country. Officials said they acted on information provided by British authorities when they secured search warrants for properties in Queensland state and then arrested Haneef late Monday.

Haneef, 27, was being detained under counterterrorism laws that allow police to hold a suspect without charge as long as a judge agrees there are grounds to do so, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said.

Prime Minister John Howard said a judge had already agreed to extend Haneef's detention, as a senior British police officer made his way to Australia.

"A chief inspector from the British Metropolitan police is on his way to Australia to assist with the interrogations and to assist with the inquiries," Howard said.

Keelty said a second doctor at the hospital, who was questioned by authorities because of information divulged by Haneef, had been released without charge.

"The man that was spoken to yesterday is now free to go. There is nothing there to charge that person," Police Commissioner Mick Keelty told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Wednesday.

Threads connecting some of the eight suspects _ including at least four doctors _ arrested in the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow, Scotland, began to emerge Wednesday as British authorities mined evidence left behind from the failed attacks.

"The grounding for the search warrants was that we were alleging that Dr. Haneef was connected to a terrorist group," Keelty told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television.

No charges were filed Tuesday, and Keelty stressed that Haneef's role _ if any _ in the plots in Britain was far from established.

"There is suspicion, there is a complex investigation under way, there is an enormous time difference between what's happening in the U.K. and what's happening here in Australia," he said. "But we should be cautious here. Dr. Haneef may have done nothing wrong, and may at the end of the day be free to go."

Mark Shone, a spokesman for Halton Hospital in England, said Haneef worked there in 2005 as a temporary doctor. He also said a 26-year-old Indian man arrested Saturday in Liverpool practiced at the hospital. He would not give the man's name, nor say whether he worked there at the same time as Haneef.

Australian television's Nine Network reported, without citing sources, that Haneef was a former housemate of one of the British suspects. Authorities would not immediately confirm this.

Government and police officials said Haneef was living in Liverpool before he came to Australia in last year after he responded to an advertisement in the British Medical Journal for a job at the Gold Coast Hospital in Queensland.

He was granted a temporary work visa, moved to the region _ a tourist and retiree destination of high-rise condos strung along sun-drenched beaches _ and became the hospital's registrar.

"The doctor was regarded by the hospital as, in many senses, a model citizen _ excellent references and so on," Queensland Premier Peter Beattie told a news conference.

Beattie said the second doctor was also recruited from Liverpool.

Police seized Haneef late Monday at the international airport in the Queensland capital of Brisbane, where he was trying to board a flight with a one-way ticket.

Officials declined to name his destination. Australian media reported he was bound for India via Malaysia.

Howard, speaking in the national capital of Canberra, refused to say whether British authorities had sought Haneef's extradition. He said there was no evidence an attack was being planned in Australia.

"There has been no change to our security position, no change at all," he said.

Haneef is one of eight people arrested over the failed terror attacks in Britain that include two car bombs that failed to explode in central London on Friday, and two men who on Saturday rammed a vehicle with gas cylinders into an airport entrance in Glasgow, and then set it on fire.

Records showed Haneef graduated in 2002 from Rajiv Ganghi University of Health Sciences at Bangalore, in India's Karnataka state, the ABC reported.

Britain's The Independent and The Muslim News newspapers reported that the Halton Hospital worker arrested in Liverpool on Saturday was a doctor from Bangalore.

Beattie said Haneef had passed all the necessary tests to practice medicine in Australia.

The manager of the apartment block where Haneef lived on the Gold Coast said the Indian had paid his rent in cash on Friday, and made no mention of leaving Australia.

"I never saw him with anyone, he was very quiet," Steve Bosher told the Nine Network.