An Australian man convicted of receiving funds from Al Qaida has said Osama bin Laden does not like to be kissed and described himself as a reluctant Muslim who loved beer. Joseph Terrence Thomas said he had been seeking spiritual fulfilment as he went from a Christian upbringing in suburban Australia to becoming a Muslim convert training at an Al Qaida camp in Afghanistan. "I never really thought I'd be a Muslim," Thomas said on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Four Corners" program on Monday. "I'd say, 'Oh look, you know, I really love your religion but I really love my beer'," he said.Thomas, also known as Jack, on Sunday became the first Australian convicted under tough new anti-terrorism laws. The 32-year-old father of three was found guilty in Victoria state's Supreme Court of receiving $3,500 and a plane ticket from senior al Qaeda agent Khaled bin Attash after training at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 2001. A jury of nine women and three men on Sunday also found him guilty of possessing a false passport. Sentencing proceedings will begin on Thursday and Thomas's lawyers have said he plans to appeal against the convictions. Thomas was found not guilty of two charges that he had intentionally provided support and resources to bin Laden's militant network between July 2002 and January 2003.
While he was at the Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, Thomas said he saw bin Laden three times, once shaking hands with him. "Very polite and humble and shy. He didn't like too many kisses ... he didn't mind being hugged but kisses he didn't like and he just seemed to float .. across the floor," Thomas told Four Corners in interviews recorded a month ago.
While admitting he trained at the camp and met bin Laden, Thomas has said in several interviews that he never had any intention of accepting Attash's offer of becoming a "sleeper" agent in Australia. "I might be naive and I might be an idealist, but I am not a dickhead who will help to hurt innocent people, which those people have shown is their tactic," he told The Age newspaper in interviews recorded about four weeks ago and published on Monday.
Thomas was a pantomime performer as a child and said he started ballet classes so he could meet girls. Disappointed when he was rejected by a Victorian dance school for being too stocky, he instead joined his brothers' punk rock band, The Lobotomy Scars.
Thomas, a short, baby-faced man with a thin beard, walked to court each day of his week-long trial in Melbourne with his parents Ian, a retired technical school teacher, and his mother Patsy, an aged-care nurse, by his side. His family described him as an idealist with a great social conscience who was driven by injustice. He worked in a soup kitchen and took up sky diving and scuba diving and dabbled in Buddhism and the occult before a Muslim friend took him to a mosque. After his conversion to Islam, he chose the name "Jihad". He wanted a Muslim wife and married Maryati, an Indonesian policeman's daughter, after flying to South Africa to meet her on a friend's recommendation.
Thomas told the ABC he met Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir in Malaysia in 2000 on his way back from his haj pilgrimage to Mecca. Bashir was jailed for 30 months for his role in the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians. "My wife had gone to school with his wife," Thomas said.
He said he went to Afghanistan seeking an Islamic utopia but didn't find it. He was detained in Pakistan in January 2003. "The Taliban had their traditions but many of them were not Islamic," he told The Age, referring to Afghanistan's fundamentalist Islamic rulers who were driven from power in late 2001 after they refused to hand over bin Laden.