Eye-opening revelations from the Jack Roche Al Qaeda trial in Australia: Trial Shows Links Between Terror Groups.

PERTH, Australia - In testimony to investigators and scribblings in a pocket notebook, a British convert to Islam has shown how tightly knit the terror network of al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiyah really is. Ties to men in both led Jack Roche to a meeting with Osama bin Laden himself.

The 50-year-old Englishman pleaded guilty Friday to conspiring to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Australia in 2000 — a plot that was never carried out. He is to be sentenced Tuesday, and could face up to 25 years in jail.

Roche told the court the idea for the embassy attack came from al-Qaida; he said he also had pledged allegiance to Jemaah Islamiyah, an extremist group that seeks to create an Islamic state in Southeast Asia.

Roche said that in April 2000, when he had been a Jemaah Islamiyah member in Australia for two years, bin Laden’s deputies assigned him to form an underground cell here by recruiting Australian Muslims. He also was told to plan the bombing of the embassy in Canberra, he said.

He said Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir called off the plot that summer because of squabbling between Australian-based militants and an Indonesian known as Hambali, who was then Jemaah Islamiyah’s operations chief.

Roche described Bashir as the head of Jemaah Islamiyah, a charge repeatedly denied by the cleric, who is being held in Indonesia on suspicion of terrorist links.

Roche’s weeklong testimony, in taped interviews with investigators and under cross-examination, painted Bashir as a major link between al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiyah. He said Hambali, whose real name is Riduan Isamuddin, was subordinate to Bashir and that one of Roche’s main al-Qaida contacts in Pakistan was Bashir’s son.

Jemaah Islamiyah has long been characterized by security officials of numerous countries as being part of al-Qaida’s global network. It was blamed for bombings on the Indonesian resort island of Bali that killed 202 people in 2002 and for bombing a hotel in Indonesia’s capital that killed 12 people last August.

During his trial, Roche — who said he converted to Islam in part to tackle a drinking problem — said the Sydney mosque where he went weekly was akin to bin Laden’s office in Australia.

He said the Australian activities, operations and funding of al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiyah overlapped. And he said he was given $8,000 to pay for the embassy attack by Hambali and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a planner of the Sept. 11 attacks. Both are now in U.S. custody.

Roche said al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiyah kept in contact through the Internet and that he also communicated with Hambali and Mohammed over mobile phones.

When told by a Jemaah Islamiyah leader in Australia to go to Malaysia in early 2000 to meet Hambali, Roche said, he correctly surmised he would also be going to Afghanistan, where al-Qaida had training camps.

Roche said he met with Hambali at a mosquito-infested home in Banting, Malaysia, and later with Mohammed at a house in Karachi, Pakistan, where the living room was filled with men working on computers.

Then, he testified, he endured a bone-jolting bus ride from Karachi to Quetta, where he crossed the border into Afghanistan and was driven to an al-Qaida encampment 10 miles outside the southern city of Kandahar.

There, he said, he had lunch with bin Laden, who already was under U.S. indictment for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 231 people in 1998.

Roche said he needed only handwritten notes from Hambali and Mohammed to see bin Laden. But he testified they had only an innocuous exchange.

“I was about to walk into the married men’s sleeping quarters when he stopped me and said `Fadal akhi,’ or `Please, brother,’ in Arabic,” Roche said. He said he was sent to sleep in the single men’s section.

Roche said he was taught to use TNT at the camp.

He said he also was questioned by a man called Abu Hafs about the situation in Australia and the region. He said Abu Hafs was bin Laden’s second in command and could have been Abu Hafs al-Masri, alias Mohammad Atef, a top lieutenant of bin Laden who killed by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001.

Roche said, “They seemed to be very concerned with the south of the Philippines,” the site of a Muslim insurgency. Al-Qaida leaders also weren’t happy that Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, has a secular government, he said.

Roche said he was asked about possible Israeli targets and U.S. interests in Australia and about “American airlines that flew in and out to the United States.”

Abu Hafs came up with the idea of exploding a truck bomb outside the Israeli Embassy in Canberra, Roche said.

Both Mohammed and Abu Hafs overruled Hambali’s idea to attack the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Roche said. “It wasn’t seen as anything that would have been at all beneficial to what they were aiming for,” he said.

Roche, instead, was to focus on Israeli targets and recruit members to send to Afghanistan for training, he scribbled in his notebook, which was admitted into court as evidence. He wrote in Indonesian, which he learned in Jakarta.

Roche said he returned to Australia in May 2000 and outlined the bombing plan for Abdulrahman and Abdulrahim Ayub, twin Indonesians who headed Jemaah Islamiyah’s local branch. They resented the outside influence and complained to Bashir, he said.

Roche insisted he had no intention of carrying out the attack and that his role was limited to surveillance. He said he wanted out, but was afraid he would be killed if he didn’t go ahead.

He said he tried to torpedo the plot by going to the U.S. Embassy and reporting: “I’ve met Osama bin Laden and they (al-Qaida) have targets in mind.” Embassy officials told him to contact Australia’s spy agency, which ignored his calls, Roche said.

But with the Ayub twins continuing to complain about Hambali, Bashir phoned that July and canceled the plot, Roche said.