Tony Kevin profiles Abu Quassey (Mootaz Hasan Mohammed)
in December 2002

I wrote this piece in December 2002, when Abu Quassey’s term of imprisonment in Indonesia for passport violations was coming to a close. It is now worth recalling.

www.sievx.com was then engaged in a vigorous and effective campaign (including even an on-site countdown clock) to try to have Quassey brought to trial on SIEV X -related charges, as demanded by the Senate motion passed on 11 December 2002, whose operative paragraph was:

"Calls on the Australian and Indonesian Governments to undertake all actions necessary prior to 1 January 2003 to ensure that Abu Quessai is immediately brought to justice:

(i) on all matters relating to the outstanding warrants relating to people smuggling, and

(ii) in relation to his involvement with the vessel known as SIEV X, including the foundering and sinking of that vessel with the resultant tragic loss of 353 lives"

My article summarised what was then known about Abu Quassey’s potential links to people smuggling disruption programs in Indonesia (both Indonesian and Australian).

It has been on sievx.com until now, but it is now being transferred from sievx.com to tonykevin.com.

With the Quassey trial underway in Egypt, this piece is again very topical, nearly a year after it was written. It is remarkable how little of this material has been discussed in media coverage of the Quassey ( Mootaz Hasan Muhammad) trial in Egypt. How mush of this material, one wonders, has been put before the Egyptian prosecutor in the Australian authorities’ "six big files containing thousands of papers" in regard to the case ? See

http://www.sievx.com/articles/psdp/2003/20031026AlGomhuria.html

TK 28.10.2003

 

 

"Tony Kevin Profiles Abu Quassey"

18 December 2002

Putting together material that is mostly now available on the www.sievx.com website - some old, some new - relevant to Abu Quassey's career, strengthens my judgement that he was a people smuggling disruption agent or "sting" agent, who for two years prior to the SIEVX tragedy in October 2001 was being secretly assisted to increase his market share in the people smuggling industry in Indonesia, by Indonesian police disruption teams and by their AFP trainers and taskmasters.

Some of the reasoning supporting this strong conclusion was set out for the first time in one place in my Adelaide speech of 14 December 2002; [text is on Margo Kingston's Webdiary SIEV X archive]:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/14/1039656227615.html

Here now is some more supporting material, with linking commentaries - more of my "joining the dots" analysis - that strengthens and fleshes out that conclusion. Please read, and judge for yourself.

First, the memoir of a boat person, Dr Amir Al-Obaidi, "From Iraq To Woomera", reported in 2 February 2002 ‘Australian Financial Review’ by Susan Owens

http://www.sievx.com/articles/background/20020202AFR_
FromIraqToWoomera.html

refers to what may have been Abu Quassey's first people smuggling venture, in December 1999. Dr Amir says it was Quassey who organised his voyage, which he describes as follows:

‘We went by ferry to an island in the north of Indonesia. This island was a terrible place, full of bad people, prostitutes, smugglers, drug dealers, thieves. We were put in a bad hotel and were in the hands of the Egyptian smuggler, who called himself only Hussein.

'Hussein was the same man who sent the boat that drowned 350 people. We should have had the same destiny, ours was the same kind of boat although Hussein showed us pictures of a beautiful white cruise ship.

‘He said, "You'll be happy when you get to Australia, you'll be processed within 45 days, be given permanent residency, your passport in three months then you can bring your families. The Government will pay you about $10,000 to start your life." Everybody was very happy’.

On Christmas Eve December 1999, Amir and 285 other refugees left the small island, with their one small bag. They had been told to destroy their passports.

'We reached Java, north of Jakarta. For two nights, we were taken on a seven-hour bus trip to a different port then back to cabins because the weather was bad. On the third night Hussein decided the conditions were good and small rowboats took us out. People were struggling to get onto them; some had missed the last boat.

'It was dark, 2am. That was their trick. If I had seen the boat I would never have gone.

'People were crammed on the stairs, on the decks. There were two toilets in the form of two planks out over the stern, covered by a curtain. The smuggler prepared good food, French bread, canned fish, oranges, apples, Coca-Cola and lots of bottled water.

'The boat had three quite sophisticated devices guiding it through the seas and the pilot was talked all the way down by radio.

'When the sun rose we saw the terrible state of the boat and realised why we boarded at night. We saw terrible things in the sea around us, signs of a boat which had sunk. There were cooking pots, pieces of wood and clothing.

'The boat leaked. I spent a lot of time down below pulling buckets of water out. After 36 hours we reached Australia at Christmas Island. It was difficult to believe we had arrived at all, looking back at the boat. It was like a child's toy, mended with tape. I had this
thought in my mind, that when I was a child, they used to show us news on TV of how the Vietnamese came to Australia by boat. My family thought they were crazy, we criticised that. And here I was, like one of the Vietnamese.’

Several comments on this interesting detailed account.

First, Quassey clearly had help - in organising the land travel, in rowing groups of people out to the boat, in talking the boat down through the voyage. This boat was intended to reach Christmas Island, and thereby to establish Quassey's credentials in the market place as a successful people smuggler who could deliver the promised outcome.

Second, Quassey lied: to attract customers he promised a big white ship and friendly welcome in Australia. He delivered a dangerous and overcrowded wreck. The operational signature is the same.

Third, and what is most interesting: This early voyage seems designed to send a powerful message of how dangerous using people smugglers may be. Amir is left with a feeling of amazement that he got to Christmas Island at all; He remembers the boat as hugely overcrowded
and unsafe; structurally unsound, "like a child's toy mended with tape". And then as the sun rises the already frightened passengers see terrible signs of a past tragedy: floating cooking pots, pieces of wood, clothing.

Think about this. How likely is it that travelling across 300- odd miles of empty ocean between Indonesia and Christmas Island, this boat would just happen across such wreckage from a previous sunken asylum-seeker boat? Highly improbable, surely? How easy would it have been for the crew to simply scatter some of this stuff around in the water and then make sure the passengers see it?

Many boats operated by other people smugglers were not especially overcrowded; they carried enough lifejackets and they were structurally sound. For example, this piece by Colleen Egan (Weekend Australian, 11 December 1999) reports:

http://www.sievx.com/articles/psdp/19991211ColleenEgan.html

"Large numbers of Muslims are now arriving in well-fitted boats with expensive Global Positioning System, radio and other navigational equipment. Workers describe the recent boats as 'one-trip wonders' with new linoleum on the floors, new motors, generators and bilge pumps, and fuel tanks with 2000 litres of spare diesel."

Quassey's boats seemed conspicuously risky and overcrowded, and to be remembered by passengers as such, yet this does not seem to have damaged his business. This might be because his competitors were being squeezed out of the market, while he was apparently being protected by powerful police connections, and apparently immune to official harassment.

Now comes a very important matter:

Pamela Curr, spokesperson on Refugees for the Victorian Greens, made the following written statement. Part of Pamela Curr's message hereunder was reported in an article by Andrew Clennell, SMH 25 February 2002, "Failure to act on smuggler blamed for 350 boat deaths":

http://www.sievx.com/articles/psdp/20020225AndrewClennell.html

" I remind DIMIA yet again that the Compliance Department were notified and given extensive information on Quassey and his network by me in January 2001.

‘In late December 2000 I was approached by a number of people and asked to assist in a serious matter. They explained to me that they had discussed this matter and wanted advice about how to pass this information to those who could take action on it. They asked me to do this on their behalf because they lacked confidence in ACM and DIMIA after their treatment in the desert camps. they were afraid of the consequences of approaching DIMIA but despite this they decided that they must take action because there was "a very bad man who will cause many, many people to die and he does not care". They gave me this information which I wrote down. They asked me to tell the Australian government about this person, to stop him putting people's
lives at risk.

‘In January 2001, I rang the Compliance Section of DIMIA at their request. It was a long call during which I gave them the names that Abu Quassey uses, mobile phone numbers, names of his accomplices, names of the Indonesian officers who take bribes and participate in sending boats away from Indonesia, names of the hotels used as meeting places and where refugees are placed, names of the beach places from which the boats embark and details of how the voyages are organised. I was asked to tell the officers not to ring the mobile phone numbers using Australian voices but to get Arabic speaking people to ring because otherwise the phones would be dumped. They wanted this information given so that Abu Quassey would be stopped as they believed that it was only a matter of time before one of his boats sank and lives were lost".

Curr's letter concludes:

"If the Australian Government had taken action to stop Quassey's people smuggling activities then, they could have saved 354 lives. They had the information a full nine months before the terrible fears of the informers were realised. Why didn't they act?"

Why indeed?

Curr's information to the DIMIA Compliance Department would have undoubtedly been reported, through the DIMIA/AFP People Smuggling Strike Team (note the name!), to the AFP people smuggling disruption program liaison officers in Jakarta.

Now consider this next point:

Don Greenlees had an article in The Australian of 23 June 2001 "People who Move People",

http://www.sievx.com/articles/psdp/20010623DonGreenlees.html

purporting to be a detailed full account of who the main people smugglers were in different regions of Indonesia and how they operated. Greenlees won a Walkley Award for this article as the best piece of Australian investigative journalism in South East Asia in 2001.

Quassey (who operated out of Jakarta) was not mentioned in the article. The only Jakarta-based smugglers mentioned were Hasan Ayoub and Sayeed Omeid, described as follows by Greenlees:

"The two have controlled boat departures through West Java and South Sumatra, and it is believed that until a week ago they were behind every boat arriving at Christmas Island. They have sent at least three vessels carrying 525 people so far this year."

Now this is really interesting. The sort of authoritative detail Greenlees presents in his article can only have been obtained from detailed AFP or Embassy briefings from officials who were involved in the Australian disruption program and who were closely tracking the industry as part of their job.

So why is Quassey's name not in the article? Already, Australian authorities had a substantial dossier on his activities, thanks to Pamela Curr. Also, CMI official testimony indicates that the
Australian authorities were getting intelligence reports on Quassey since at least July 2001.

According to the Defence Department's 'SIEVX Chronology' submitted to the CMI Committee on 4 July 2002, the earliest mention of Quassey is 20 July 2001

http://www.sievx.com/images/CMI_Docs/Hill20020704_06.gif .

Why isn't Quassey's name in the Greenlees article? Here is a hypothesis: Quassey's name was deliberately left out of the AFP briefing Greenlees would have received, because a public message was being conveyed, with the purpose of "outing" and damaging genuine people smugglers like Ayoub and Omeid. Their business was to be thus handicapped while Quassey's business was to be boosted.

I have no doubt that Greenlees' article was studied by asylum-seekers in Indonesia, desperate to make the right choice of people-smuggler. Quassey's apparent official immunity, demonstrated by the non-appearance of his name, would have been persuasive in the well-informed boat people marketplace - even if his voyages were often leaky overcrowded boats that failed to reach Australia.

To take up the story again: Starting in August 2001, after a long pause when there were few boats, a series of heavily overloaded boats (three boats with over 300 people on each) began to head for at Christmas Island. Though they had GPS navigation, they were heavily overloaded, unsafe, experienced engine failures, and carried many women and children. Recognise a pattern? Might one of these manifestly high-risk voyages have been intended to be the SIEV X deterrent? Was Quassey associated with any of these voyages? We don't know, because of all the blackout ink in tendered CMI official documents.

We do know that in late August, Palapa carrying more than 400 people was left wallowing in the water for two days after its engines failed about 60 miles out from Christmas Island - despite being seen and logged by Coastwatch aircraft - before Palapa's distress signals were officially recognised and actioned by Coastwatch, when it finally sent the message to shipping that led to Tampa picking up the passengers. It is amazing that there were no deaths on Palapa. Who organised the Palapa voyage?

For an interesting account of one of these August 2001 overcrowded voyages, see Sally Loane - SMH 20 August 2001, "That sinking feeling as another leaky old boat heaves to":

http://www.sievx.com/articles/psdp/20010820SallyLoane.html .

Now fast-forward to October 24, to Greenlees' important Australian article on SIEVX, "Overload kills on voyage of doom", which contains many clues to the whole affair:

http://www.sievx.com/articles/disaster/20011024_Greenlees.html

"Survivors interviewed yesterday said they had told Australian officials of the identity of the main people-smuggler behind the operation -- a man identifying himself as an Egyptian citizen named Abu Quassey. He is believed to be associated with one of the biggest people-smuggling rings in Indonesia, operating out of Jakarta."

So when it no longer matters - when the biggest sting of all has been completed, and the massively lethal lesson has been finally delivered - Quassey can now safely be revealed as a big people smuggler operating out of Jakarta.

There is no further reason to shelter him, because the people smuggling industry has now been dealt the terminal deterrent blow - it effectively no longer has a market, because who dares to buy a ticket to likely death? The truth of the warnings in the Australian Embassy leaflets and t-shirts (as provided in written evidence to CMI) has finally, and terribly, been demonstrated:

"The boats used by people-smugglers are overcrowded and dangerous. Too many have died trying to enter Australia by boat. Stop. Go back. Don't get further into the trap."

The above chronology strengthens the arguments I have previously set out for Quassey being linked to the AFP-supported Indonesian Police People Smuggling Disruption Program. To recapitulate those points in summary:

Quassey's refusal to name his partners who prepared the boat, and his agitation at the suggestion they were police or military.

Police protection of a massive overnight four-bus convoy of 421 people across Indonesia and the Sunda Strait car ferry, and accommodation at Bandar Lampung in a police hotel, and police armed enforcement (with an armed and violent Quassey) of the overloaded embarkation.

Quassey was seen to have a police radio-telephone.

Quassey's maid said he was always on the phone (to whom? not all that many asylum-seekers had phones). I would suggest, to his partners and mentors.

Quassey had a big house with servants and guards (How could a former driver get rich so quickly? Who paid the rent and the wages?)

Quassey offered people who had sailed on his previous unsuccessful voyages free places on SIEVX, to boost the numbers up to a sinking load.

Quassey's Mandaean Christian accomplice quietly warned a Mandaean Christian group of 24 people at Bandar Lampung to get off the boat as soon as it was safe to do so.

The grey patrol boat or boats that came out in the night to monitor results; it would seem they had access to data from a tracking device in SIEVX, which they had likely installed, to be able to find the sinking location ( 50-65 miles south of Java) so easily.

The ease with which fishing boats found survivors the next day, and their improbable story that they had seen wreck debris floating in the water and so had come out to have a look, well beyond their normal fishing grounds.

The great detail in the intelligence that came down to Canberra on 23 October on SIEVX, that could not possibly have all come from survivors: Australian officials must have got some of this
information directly or indirectly from those who organised and monitored the doomed voyage; which suggests a Quassey-POLDA-AFP linkage.

There have been no homicide prosecutions or enquiries in Indonesia.

A short passport-fraud sentence for the admitted organiser Quassey expires conveniently on 1 January 2003 when world media interest will be at its lowest.

Keelty's written advice on 30 July 2002 to CMI – see

http://www.sievx.com/images/CMI_Docs/AFPLetter.gif and attached files)

on how the AFP disruption program was set up and operated in Indonesia - a lavishly funded Australian system that selected, trained and funded five teams of people smuggling disruption mercenaries ( the Special Intelligence Units or SIUs) within the Indonesian police force, while giving the AFP and Australian Government maximum plausible deniability based on "need-to-know" and "better-not-to-know" principles.

A whistleblower in the system who is now reportedly leaking information to Labor Senators:
"Labor has... received information from what it believes are well-placed sources suggesting that Australian intelligence knew about the sabotage of asylum-seeker boats and that Australians may have played an indirect role in such activities."

The Australian Government's manifest lack of intent to do anything effective before 1 January with the Indonesian Government to bring Quassey to justice, despite a clear and strong Senate motion to this effect.

My final question for 2002 is this:

Does the Australian Government's concern to protect the grubby secrets of the AFP People Smuggling Disruption Program outweigh the concern it should properly have, to help bring to justice a self-confessed organiser of a voyage that killed 353 people?

Tony Kevin, 18 December 2002