10/11/2005
From: By Natasha Robinson
SHANE Gregory Kent, with his pale skin and reddish-tinged hair, is a stand-out among the list of 17 men arrested over a plot to launch a large-scale terrorist attack. Kent, or Yasin, as he has been known since converting to Islam, was born in November, 1976, in the ethnically diverse outer southeastern Melbourne suburb of Dandenong.
Like other homegrown extremists, Jack Roche, Jack Thomas and David Hicks, Kent is a Caucasian who allegedly became an enthusiastic supporter of global jihad. Details of his youth and education are sketchy, but he is known to have converted to Islam, become radicalised at the mosque and Brunswick meeting hall of firebrand cleric Sheik Mohammed Omran and his group the Ahlus Sunnah Wal-Jamaah Association, and then further under the wing of the even more radical Abdul Nacer Benbrika, or Abu Bakr. In 2001, Kent furthered his studies in terrorism at al-Qaeda's central training site for foreign volunteers, Camp Al Faruq, in an Afghanistan ruled at the time by the sharia law of the Taliban. But last year he attended a course of a different kind, studying multimedia at Broadmeadows TAFE, in Melbourne's working-class north. To his neighbours in the downmarket northern suburb of Meadow Heights, Kent attracted little attention. His wife, Eman, though, was something of a community samaritan. On the split block behind the Kent house in Woods Close, neighbour Aynur Erdekli did not see much of Kent, but his wife would call often during the four or five months they had been her neighbours. Eman would even take trips to the pharmacy to pick up medication for the ill 60-year-old. "She would call me Mummy, and say if there is anything you need I get it for you," Ms Erdekli said. As for Kent himself, "He is going, coming, coming, going, coming with the red car". According to Kent's 46-year-old mother-in-law, the suspect's wife was asleep in bed when police arrested him in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Kent himself was awake, sitting at his computer, his six-year-old son, Ibrahim, one of his two children, asleep on the couch. The couple's daughter, Sarah, was elsewhere in the house. The mother-in-law, who declined to give her name, said that during the 2.30am raid, five policemen had jumped on Eman, restraining her. They refused her pleas to allow her to contact a friend to support her. The mother-in-law showed The Australian the scene at his home after the raid, wailing and crying, "Is this what a terrorist's bedroom looks like? Is this the kind of bed a terrorist sleeps in? Where do they hide the bombs in here?" There were no sheets on the marital bed, a double mattress lay on the floor. A child's learn-to-read book and a pink Texta was scattered on the bed. Canan Goc, a neighbour of the Kents, said about 10 days ago she had seen a group of men with long beards gathered at the house at about 10pm. "There were lots of people sitting at the front of the house," she said. The mother-in-law shook her head and laughed at the idea that Kent was a member of the radical Islamist splinter group led by cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakr. But an Australian Federal Police witness statement signed by the man Kent travelled with, known by his adopted Muslim name Abu Jihad, tells a different story. In the witness statement, Abu Jihad said he had travelled with Kent to Afghanistan to train. At one stage he had wanted to leave the camp, but, "Shane Kent persuaded me to stay". Two other Australians were at the camp at the same time as Kent and Abu Jihad - one is David Hicks, currently incarcerated at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay detention centre. The other cannot be named for legal reasons. Kent's mother-in-law said he had spent three months in Lebanon in 2002 and had found a job in Dubai. SOURCE: News.com.au |
