Australian tower 'was terror target'

Melbourne's Rialto Towers, center, is Australia's tallest building

By CNN staff reporters

MELBOURNE, Australia (CNN) -- Australia's tallest building, the Rialto Towers in Melbourne, was the possible target of a terrorist attack, Prime Minister John Howard has confirmed.

The revelation comes following the confession of a man arrested in India on suspicion of being a member of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

Indian Home Minister L.K. Advani said Wednesday that the man, arrested in Mumbai, had confessed to planning September-11th style attacks on buildings in India, Australia and Britain.

He said that Indian police believe the man, nicknamed "the pilot", to be an Al Qaeda operative and say he underwent flight training in the U.K. and Australia.

The man, Mohammed Afroz, had been trained as a pilot in the southern city of Melbourne in 1997 and 1998.

Melbourne is Australia's second largest city, with a population of around 3.5 million.

Howard told radio listeners Friday that Australian officials had asked Indian authorities for authority to interview the man.

He said the allegations needed to be taken seriously.

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"We seek, quite naturally, to undertake some of our own investigations," he said.

"You do have to allow for the fact that people will embellish and invent and exaggerate and fabricate for whatever combination of psychological or other reasons. We have got to bear in mind that that is a real possibility.

"There may be no substance in this beyond the fact that he had flight training in Australia," he said.

In a related development, Australia's SBS Radio reports that the U.S rushed FBI investigators to the South Australian city of Adelaide soon after the September 11 attacks after being told seven Middle Eastern men had sought urgent pilot training there.

Because the urgency of the request could not be met in Adelaide, the seven chose to train in the United States instead.

No links between the men and any terrorist organizations has been found. Home Minister Advani relased the information on Afroz while speaking to a group of business leaders in the Indian capital of New Delhi about the need to adopt hard measures to tackle the problem of terrorism in India.

To that end, the Indian government is planning to introduce a new anti-terrorism law in the current winter session of parliament - despite widespread opposition from other parties.

The Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, or POTO, as it is called, has to be cleared by the Indian parliament in the current winter session.

'Fascist' government

The Ordinance may run into trouble, as it has yet to win the support of opposition groups in India, namely the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress Party and the Left-wing Communist Parties (CPI and CPM). Those groups can effectively block the bill in parliament's Upper House.

Members of the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and the Congress clashed in New Delhi earlier this week over the issue of POTO.

The opposition parties claim the Bill is unnecessary, and will be misused by the BJP against political rivals. "It echoes the real intention of this fascist autocratic government", read a statement by the Communist Party (Marxist) politburo.

A clause that would punish any journalist who interviews a member of a terrorist organization, with fines and possible imprisonment has also drawn considerable flak from the Indian media.

Banned groups

Indian Home Minister LK Advani says the suspect made "shocking confessions"

The government says it will reconsider the clause affecting journalists, but would not give up on the Bill itself.

It plans to introduce POTO in the lower house of parliament around December 11th and in the upper house on the 18th.

Already 23 groups, mainly those operating in the violence-torn state of Jammu and Kashmir, have been banned under the POT Ordinance.

On Wednesday, the Union Home Ministry, headed by Advani announced the banning of 2 more groups, the People's War Group, and the Maoist Communist Centre, that were implicated in the bombing of a Coca Cola factory in Hyderabad last month.

The government says the Ordinance is essential for its war against terrorism, accusing the opposition parties of opposing it for "political reasons" and saying that the Congress Party is putting itself "above the national interest".