Vic: Flight Training Schools under media seige

AAP General News (Australia)
12-07-2001
Vic: Flight Training Schools under media seige

MELBOURNE, Dec 7 AAP - Flight schools at Melbourne's Moorabbin airport have been under
media siege today following reports a suspected suicide pilot trained there four years
ago.

Receptionists at about 30 flight schools said they had been fielding calls from international
and Australian journalists since yesterday afternoon.

Moorabbin airport, about 15 kilometres east of Melbourne city, handles light recreational
and commercial air traffic and is considered one of Australia's busiest air traffic areas.

"I have two pages of calls logged," the receptionist at Moorabbin Aviation Academy said.

The suspect, identified as Mohammed Afroz, a 28-year-old Muslim and resident of a Mumbai
slum, took flying lessons at the airport, Prime Minister John Howard confirmed today.

He said the man was not an Australian citizen but had undertaken flight training at
Moorabbin airport in 1997 and 1998.

Afroz appeared in an Indian court late yesterday charged with "waging war against the
nation of India".

He was arrested on October 2 after he was found staying in a hotel close to his Mumbai
home, a police officer in Mumbai told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

He said the man claimed Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network had planned terrorist attacks
in Australia, Britain and India similar to the September 11 attacks on the United States.

According to a spokeswoman for Schutt Aviation, federal investigators had visited all
flying schools at the suburban airport following the September 11 attack on the United
States.

"We have not trained any pilots from Afghanistan and nobody here has heard that the
other schools have," she said.

Photographers, television crews and journalists began arriving late yesterday afternoon
and have been "inquiring door to door ever since", she said.

AAP ag/jlw/ns/de

KEYWORD: TERROR AUST MOORABBIN

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