TWO West Australian hospitals have been raided and a further five foreign doctors questioned as Australian inquiries connected to the foiled United Kingdom terrorist attacks spread to two more states.WA police yesterday interviewed and released four Indian doctors working on 457 skilled migrant visas after raiding the Kalgoorlie and Royal Perth hospitals, along with two more undisclosed premises. Another overseas doctor in New South Wales was interviewed by counter-terrorism police yesterday. Federal police also are combing through 31,000 documents – some of them in foreign languages – seized in the raids, including on laptop computers.
Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said several items had been taken by police for further examination, including mobile phones and laptop computers. "The linkages are with people who are known to each other and that's prompting the further inquiries," he said. "This is not about doctors. These are people who are of similar nationalities, and the warrants that were executed in WA were in Kalgoorlie and Royal Perth Hospital."
| * Two WA hospitals raided * Four doctors questioned * Overseas doc interviewed by police * Police combing through documents |
Mr Ruddock said the AFP and WA police had been working in close cooperation and were liaising closely with other Australian authorities and the UK. "It should be emphasised that a presumption of innocence exists in every police inquiry. No one has been arrested, charged or detained in relation to these inquiries," he said. "There is no suggestion of any threat to the people of WA and the Australian Government has received no information which would result in an increased threat.
"As this is an ongoing investigation, it would be inappropriate to comment further."
The AFP has been given until Monday night to hold Dr Haneef in Queensland during which time it will peruse a huge number of documents seized during the Australian raids. "Obviously (the documents) take some time to work through, particularly if they're in a foreign language," Mr Keelty said.
WA Premier Alan Carpenter said he did not want to see a backlash against overseas-trained doctors. "There is nothing that has been presented to us by the police that would lead us to believe that we have got issues with our overseas trained doctors, Indian-trained or otherwise," he said. "I would not like to see a common slur against our Indian or other overseas-trained doctors because of what's happening in Britain or what's going on with the investigation in Brisbane.
"That would be very, very regrettable."