Australia Won’t Punish Lawyer for Leak

The lawyer for an Australian resident who had been a suspect in connection with the bungled bombings in London and Glasgow last June will not be subject to any disciplinary action for leaking the transcript of the police interview with his client, a state agency reviewing the matter said on Friday.

While the lawyer, Stephen Keim of Brisbane, Queensland, was guilty of a technical violation of rules governing lawyers, by making public a document that had not been submitted to the court, his action was justified by the “exceptional circumstances” of the case, the state agency, the Queensland Legal Services Commission, said. The commission also said it was “in the public interest” to dismiss the complaints against Mr. Keim.

The complaints had been filed by the head of the Australian Federal Police and a private lawyer in Brisbane, who argued that Mr. Keim had violated the rules for lawyers by leaking the transcript.

Mr. Keim has said that he took the unusual, and controversial, step of providing the transcript to a reporter because the police were leaking information that was falsely portraying his client, Mohamed Haneef, an Indian doctor who was working at a hospital in Queensland. He also acted, he said, after the Immigration Ministry revoked Dr. Haneef’s visa, saying that he had associated with people of bad character.

The transcript revealed striking discrepancies in what the police and prosecutors had told the court, and what Dr. Haneef had said during his interrogation.

Dr. Haneef was arrested at the Brisbane airport on July 2 with a one-way ticket to India. The SIM card for his cellphone had been found in possession of one of the men arrested in Britain in connection with the bombing plot.

The plot failed when two cars packed with gas canisters and parked on the street in Central London did not explode. The next day, two suspects in the plot drove a Jeep into the airport in Glasgow; it burst into flames.

The police told the court that Dr. Haneef had no explanation for having a one-way ticket; the transcript revealed that he had given the police a lengthy explanation. A prosecutor told the court that the SIM card had been found in the burning Jeep; in fact, it was found with a man several hundred miles away.

Twelve days after the leaked transcript appeared in the newspaper The Australian, the government dropped all charges against Dr. Haneef. He was subsequently deported, but the courts have recently ruled that the deportation was invalid.

(Published by Times Online, February 1, 2008)