An Australian ex-airline employee was jailed for nine years on Friday for producing a do-it-yourself jihad manual including how-to guides on bomb-making, assassinations and shooting down planes.
Former Qantas cabin cleaner Belal Khazaal was arrested in June 2004 over his Arabic-language "Provisions of the Rules of Jihad: Short Judicial Rulings and Organisational Instructions for Fighters and Mujahideen Against Infidels".
The 110-page book by Lebanese-born Khazaal, 39, included a hit-list naming former US president George W. Bush and his CIA chief George Tenet, and advice on letter-bombs, booby-traps and kidnappings.
Khazaal was arrested less than a year after being sentenced in absentia to 10 years' hard labour by a Lebanese court for alleged involvement in funding a bomb attack on a Beirut McDonald's restaurant, along with other blasts.
He denied that the book was intended to incite extremist acts, but was found guilty by a Supreme Court jury last September of knowingly making a document connected with assistance in a terrorist act.
Sentencing judge Megan Latham said it "beggars belief that a person of average intelligence who has devoted themselves to the study of Islam over some years would fail to recognise the nature of the material."
Latham described the book as a "terrorism training manual" which advocated "widespread and indiscriminate loss of life, serious injury and serious property damage".
The book was posted on a radical Islamist site under the pseudonym Abu Mohamed Attawheedy, and examined why some assassinations failed while others succeeded, such the 1981 killing of former Eqyptian president Anwar Sadat.
Copyright 2009 AFP Asian Edition
