The police authorities of Melbourne charged before a local court on August 5, 2009, four Muslims with "conspiring to commit an act in preparation or planning a terrorist act." The police alleged that the charged persons were planning to carry out an act of suicide terrorism on some barracks of the Australian Army located at a place called Holsworthy on the outskirts of Sydney. In addition to army units, the Holsworthy base, according to the Australian media. also houses an anti-extremism unit.
The names of the arrested and charged persons were given out as Nayef El Sayed, Saney Edow Aweys, Wissam Mahmoud Fattal and Yacqub Khayre. According to the police, a fifth suspect, who was already in custody in connection with some other offence, was also expected to be charged along with them. The arrested persons have been described as of Somali or Lebanese origin. Khayre has also been accused of travelling to Somalia to train and fight with the Al-Qaeda-inspired Al Shabab, which is fighting against the pro-government forces and controls large parts of Somalia.
Tony Negus, acting Chief Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, told the media: "The men's intention was to actually go into the army barracks and to kill as many soldiers as they could before they themselves were killed. Members of the group have been actively seeking a fatwa or religious ruling to justify a terror attack on Australia." A Victoria ( provincial ) police statement said that "police believe members of a Melbourne-based group have been undertaking planning to carry out a terrorist attack in Australia and are allegedly involved in hostilities in Somalia.' Peter Dein, the counter-terrorism chief of the New South Wales Police, said that the planning was probably getting to the point where the act of terrorism would have happened within weeks.
There are about 16,000 residents--many of them Australian citizens-- of Somali origin in Melbourne. Many of them came as refugees after civil strife broke out in Somalia in 1991. These Somalis belong to different Somali clans including the two principal Daarood and Hawiye clans which have been fighting for the control of Somalia. Somalia's transitional federal government (TFG), which drew its support mainly from the Daarood clan, was overthrown in 2004 by a pro-Al Qaeda group called the Islamic Courts Union, consisting largely of members of the Hawiye clan. The ICU was defeated by the TFG in late 2006 with the help of US-backed forces from Ethiopia. The defeated remnants of the ICU, emulated the Afghan Taliban, and formed a new organisation called al-Shabab, which has been fighting for the control of the country with the support of Al Qaeda.
As stated in the Chapter titled " Global Jihadi Terrorism As Seen by Al Qaeda" in my book titled Terrorism--Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No.2 to Osama bin Laden in Al Qaeda, has been speaking of a global jihadi Intifada in which the Somali Muslims will play an important role. By jihadi Intifada he means a kind of a struggle in which the role of motivated individual Muslims will become more important than that of organisations so that the weakening or collapse of an organisation would not result in a collapse of the Intifada.
In a message of December 20,2006, he said: