Jihad Jack defrauds al Qaida

This story is a little confusing. Jack Thomas aka 'Jihad Jack', an Australian who went to Afghanistan to fight with the taliban, is in court fighting charges that he received money form al Qaida. Now here's the confusing part. The prosecution is claiming that Thomas did take money from al Qaida but never intended to use the money to bomb targets in Australia. Thomas' defense called this claim 'extraordinary'.

I would think that the defense would come up with a story like that, not the prosecution. The Age

JACK Thomas "deceived al-Qaeda" by accepting a plane ticket and $US3500 cash despite having no intention of carrying out a terrorist attack in Australia, a court has heard.

Prosecutor Nicholas Robinson, SC, told the Supreme Court that Thomas admitted taking the ticket and money from senior al-Qaeda figure Khaled bin Attash after he suggested that Australia needed an attack like those on US embassies in Nairobi and Kenya.

"He took them intending not to work. In other words, in colloquial terms, he sold the handpass. He deceived al-Qaeda," Mr Robinson said. "He wasn't naive … but he was certainly calculated. He didn't end up with the ticket by accident."

Joseph Terrence Thomas, 35, has pleaded not guilty to intentionally receiving funds from a terrorist organisation, and possessing a falsified Australian passport.

...

Mr Robinson said that while Thomas had "adopted the persona of young naive boy who got lost in events over his head" in an interview with the ABC's Four Corners, it was clear he was dealing with significant decision-makers in al-Qaeda.

He said Thomas was fleeing the front line after the fall of Kabul when he was plucked from a truck by an al-Qaeda member who told him it was not safe to return to Australia and helped him cross the border.

"Then he's dropped into safe houses in Pakistan. He went over, didn't really know anybody … had no money, no job, couldn't speak the language and he's moved from house to house. He's looked after by someone. We suggest it's clearly al-Qaeda."[...]

Jim Kennan, SC, for Thomas, described the suggestion that his client had defrauded al-Qaeda as "extraordinary". "It just highlights what a thin and desperate Crown case this is," he said.

Mr Kennan said Thomas had travelled to Afghanistan with the aim of fighting for the Taliban in its civil war against the Northern Alliance, so it was "common sense" that Pakistanis sympathetic to the Taliban might help him in return.