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Melbourne. Five Muslim men went on trial before an Australian court on Monday, charged with planning an attack on a Sydney army base last year in retaliation for Australia's involvement in the Afghan war, a prosecutor said.

The men, all Australian citizens with Somali and Lebanese background, planned to shoot as many people as possible in the planned suicide raid on the army base, prosecutor Nick Robinson told the Victorian Supreme Court in Melbourne.

The men believed that Islam was under attack from nations such as Australia which has troops in Afghanistan, the Australian Associated Press reported Robinson as telling the court.

One of the men traveled to Somalia seeking a fatwa, an Islamic ruling, to sanction the attack as the group could not get one from an Australian sheikh.

All five men pleaded not guilty to conspiring to do acts in preparation for, or planning, an attack. The men were arrested in Melbourne in August 2009.

Judge Betty King told the jury that the case was not about the religion of Islam, but whether the men were guilty of criminal charges.
"The Islamic faith is not on trial. It isn't about being a Muslim," said King.

Australia's biggest terrorism trial ended in February 2009, when Muslim cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika was jailed for 15 years for leading a cell that planned to bomb a 2005 football match in Melbourne. Altogether, 12 people were jailed over the plot.

The country has not suffered a peacetime attack on home soil since a bombing outside a Sydney hotel during a Commonwealth meeting in 1978 that killed three people.

But 95 Australians have been killed in bomb attacks in Indonesia since 2002.


Reuters