Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One year ago terrorists attacked Mumbai in India. Two Australians, Brett Taylor and Doug Markell, were killed in the attack on many sites including the Taj hotel. In the last few days some very surprising information has come to light that particularly affects Australia and all countries who had victims in that attack, particularly India. The FBI arrested in Chicago a man who now goes by the name of David Coleman Headley, who personally visited every target site of the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai last year. Obviously this now appears to have been a reconnoitre for Lashkar-e-Toiba. He posed as an American Jew and visited the Jewish centre, Chabad House, in July 2008, prior to the terror attacks. Born Daood Gilani, Headley changed his name and passport in 2006. The Calcutta Telegraph reported:

It is a mystery how he got into that building … We are probing to see if he had anybody helping him locally. The FBI—

when they arrested him—

seized a book called How to Pray Like a Jew from him at the time of his arrest in Chicago. He had prepared himself thoroughly—

for this reconnoitre.

There is a program tonight on the ABC that, in its promotion, quite propitiously says, in describing these attacks that the thing that is outstanding about them is that the terrorists from Lashkar-e-Toiba apparently knew the Taj hotel and the other sites better than the staff. So it is quite clear that Headley—Gilani—was there to scope the site and he was therefore involved in the murder of 170 people, including two Australians.

What is particularly ominous about his arrest in Chicago, and something that is reported in the newspapers today, is the fact that this person was also planning to do a similar thing in other countries. The first one we know about is Denmark, where they were planning to do a similar attack on the cartoonists who made some criticism, normally part of their craft, of one of the monotheistic religions of this world. The arrest of this man by the FBI subsequently led to the arrest yesterday in Pakistan of two serving lieutenant colonels in the Pakistani army and a retired major. This is the first established link that I know of between the Pakistani armed services and this Lashkar-e-Toiba organisation and the attack on Mumbai.

The parliament earlier this week, in the regular review of the intelligence committee’s framing of the terrorist legislation, there was bipartisan support for continuing the ban on Lashkar-e-Toiba. Anyone who has been following this organisation’s activities realises that Lashkar-e-Toiba is particularly focused on trying to bring terror incidents to Australia. The Australian laws on terrorism have led to the arrest, charging and conviction in our courts of several groups of people associated with Lashkar-e-Toiba. On this terrible anniversary of the murder of 170 innocents in India, I think it is important to remember these events. The fact that it now appears that certain members of the Pakistani security services were involved in this and other terror attacks.

I also want, on this occasion, to remember two of these very innocents: Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, who were murdered on that day. Like the Mishnaic rabbis murdered by the Romans in the story immortalised in the Jewish Yom Kippur liturgy, the evidence shows that the Holtzbergs were marked out for a violent death. Rivka Holtzberg was pregnant when she was tortured and murdered by the heartless terrorists. They were murdered not in spite of their righteous, selfless qualities but precisely because of them. (Time expired)