Envoy 'checking on Iraqi expats'

By GREG ANSLEY Australia correspondent

The diplomatic storm over Canberra's expulsion of an alleged Iraqi spy mounted yesterday with claims that consular official Helal Ibrahim Aaref had been monitoring the activities of Australia's Iraqi community.

While the Iraq Embassy accused Australia of acting under pressure from the United States, expatriates said Aaref was a known intelligence officer who had broken travel restrictions to gather information in Sydney.

They said they believed the information would be used against them and their families remaining in Iraq.

The Australian Government said Aaref, who must leave the country by tomorrow, was a member of the Iraq Intelligence Service, Mukhabarat, which has in the past acted against dissidents living abroad.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer described the service as "an especially notorious organisation" and said concern about people connected with it had grown with increasing tension in the Gulf.

Downer denied there was pressure from the US, but confirmed that Washington had asked Australia to investigate Baghdad's embassy.

"We certainly conferred with the Americans on this and they have asked us to look into the activities of Iraqi diplomats," he said.

Two members of the Iraqi mission to the United Nations were expelled by Washington, another ejected by the Philippines, and the German Government said it had been asked to expel several Iraqi diplomats.

Aaref arrived in Australia four months ago as a consular official responsible for passports and visas, but was identified by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation as a spy.

Yesterday, Mohamed Al-Jabiri, a former Iraqi diplomat living in exile in Sydney, told the Australian that Aaref was known to local dissidents as an agent of the Mukhabarat.

He said Aaref had defied travel bans restricting Iraqi diplomats to a 50km radius of Canberra without 48 hours' notice to the Government, secretly attending community functions in Sydney's southwest to gather information for supporters of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

"For the past six months they have been very active, distributing money to people, collecting information about opposition parties inside Australia so they can intimidate their families back in Iraq."

Dr Mohammed al Salami, the chairman of the Organisation for Human Rights in Iraq in Sydney, said yesterday that spying on expatriates in Australia was the norm for Iraqi diplomats.

He said the embassy had recruited a local Iraqi to spy on him in the 1980s and passed recordings and transcripts to Baghdad.

When al Salami later visited Iraq he said he had been met at the airport, blindfolded and interrogated.

"Since then I never dared to visit Iraq."