MELBOURNE: Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef, who was cleared of charges in the failed UK terror plot, is determined to regain his Australian visa so that he can return to work here as currently he is unemployed in India.
Despite his ordeal in spending four weeks behind bars before the case against him collapsed, Haneef said on Monday he wanted to study and work abroad and is awaiting whether the Australian court will reinstate his work visa.
"I don't have a job at this time and I'm just relying on my ... savings and what I've done," he told ABC TV.
"The prospect of going abroad for further studies anywhere in the world or to work for any other institution in the world or attending any conference, anything like that, it all depends on me having a clear record," he said.
Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews cancelled Haneef's visa on July 16 just hours after a Brisbane magistrate freed him on bail, finding the prosecution case against him was weak.
Federal Court judge Jeffrey Spender ruled in August that Andrews had made a 'jurisdictional error' in revoking Haneef's visa on character grounds. Andrews is appealing against the decision.
Before the case against him fell apart, police alleged Haneef acted recklessly by giving a SIM card to his second cousin, Sabeel Ahmed, whom British police had charged with withholding information about a terrorist attack. Sabeel's brother, Kafeel Ahmed, had been at the wheel of a blazing jeep that crashed into Glasgow airport on June 30, a day after a bomb plot was foiled in London.
In the interview, Haneef said he had not been trying to abscond from Australia when he tried to leave Brisbane on a one-way ticket to India on July 2.
"If I were to be absconding I wouldn't have told the hospital - they have all the details with them, my home phone number, my address and ... I was travelling with my documents with me and I had all my proofs, I was not in a false identity going out leaving the country," he said.
He said he had been short of money and had asked his father-in-law to book him a ticket home to see his wife and newborn baby, without specifying whether he wanted a return ticket.
Sabeel's mother had alerted him to an issue with the SIM card that he lent Sabeel in 2006 and unsuccessfully tried to contact British police to inform about it.
When he was unable to get in touch with British police, he figured he would go ahead with his plans to return to India, he said.
Haneef said he had visited Kafeel twice at Cambridge, "but I have never come across any radical thoughts or any extremist ideas of such kind from him". He was unaware of Kafeel's activism in politics surrounding the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya, he said.
