Australian Federal Police charged a 27-year-old Indian doctor on Saturday with providing support to a terrorist group. Brisbane doctor Mohammed Haneef was picked up on July 2 as he waited with a one-way ticket for a flight to India.

According to the Australian Federal Police he has given his SIM card to Sabeel and Kafeel Ahmed when he left Britain for Australia in July 2006. Sabeel and Kafeel Ahmed are in custody in Britain over the attempted attacks in London and Glasgow.

"The specific allegation involves recklessness rather than intention," Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty told reporters in Canberra. "The allegation being that he was reckless about some of the support he provided to that group, in particular the provision of his SIM card for the use of the group."

Prosecutor Clive Porritt said Haneef would have known about the Ahmed brothers' alleged links to terrorism.

“These are people who he lived with, may have worked with, and certainly associated with,” Porritt told the Brisbane Magistrates Court. If convicted Mohammed Haneefis could be sentenced to 15 years in prison.

According to his lawyers, Haneef was charged after being questioned for 15 hours beginning on Friday night and a total of 24 hours since he was arrested.

In response, Keelty defended the time taken to charge Haneef. "It was a question of balancing human rights, balancing the needs of the community and the needs of the organization to establish the facts," he said. "The inquiries involved, and will continue to involve, something in the order of the equivalent of 36,000 four-drawer filing cabinets.”

"That is the quantity of material that's been seized in electronic form from various locations," he added.

The Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the Haneef case was a "reminder that terrorism is a global threat" and that free societies everywhere were under threat.

"Make no mistake - Islamist fanaticism hates the way of life we have," Howard said. "Islamist fanaticism is dedicated to the destruction not only to freedom of religion but freedom to the way of life that we believe in so strongly.”