Australian acquitted of taking al Qaeda cash

CANBERRA (Reuters) - An Australian taxi driver who met Osama bin Laden and described the al Qaeda leader as polite, humble and shy, was acquitted of accepting money from the al Qaeda militant network on Thursday.

But Jack Thomas, a Muslim convert, was convicted in the Supreme Court in Victoria state of the lesser charge of having a falsified passport.

"He has now been acquitted of all terrorist related charges and obviously that is a matter of great satisfaction to him and to those of us who represented him," his lawyer Jim Kennan said.

Thomas, 35, left Australia for Afghanistan in March 2001 to train with Afghanistan's Taliban. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and was convicted under Australian terrorism laws in 2006, but his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Thomas will reappear in court next week for a hearing on his sentence for the falsified passport charge.

During the latest trial, prosecutors said Thomas ended up in an al Qaeda training camp, where he saw bin Laden for the first time the day before the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Prosecutors said Thomas later accepted $3,500 and a plane ticket from al-Qaeda operative Khaled bin Attash sometime between November 2002 and January 2003.

But Thomas's defense lawyers said Thomas traveled to Afghanistan because he believed he could help stop the civil conflict there. He said Thomas was naive, and did not know he was in an al Qaeda training camp until he saw bin Laden.

Defense lawyers said the money came from Pakistanis sympathetic to the Taliban, and there was no evidence the money or plane ticket came from al Qaeda.

Much of the evidence in the latest trial came from a 2005 television interview, where Thomas said he saw bin Laden three times, describing him as "well loved" and "polite, humble and shy."

But he told the interviewer his opinion of bin Laden changed when he heard about the September 11 attacks.

Australia, a strong U.S. ally, has gradually strengthened anti-terrorism laws since the attacks.

(Reporting by James Grubel; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)