Mr_Zhai

My name is Raj Pillay. I am 63 years old and a colleague of Mohamed Haneef at Gold Coast Hospital. I emigrated here from India forty years ago and when he had just come to Australia from Britain, we became fast friends due to our similar interests pertaining to India. I helped him cope with his culture shock at first and from then on we have always been on good terms. However, I have very strong views on righteousness and justice, and I believe his behaviour over the past view months has been suspicious, which I why I have stepped up as a prosecution witness as I believe it will help the case. My first impression of him was that he was an interesting and nice man who knew a lot about the world, but his knowledge of bombs and seemingly extremist Islamic views was a bit disconcerting to me. He was always bringing these topics up in conversation, but I didn’t really think too much of it at the time. Starting from April 2007, I noticed that at work he would constantly be on the phone, excusing himself regularly from his patients for periods of up to 20 minutes whenever his phone rang. Once I was waiting in the hallway to go to the bathroom and I heard Mohamed’s voice coming from inside it. He sounded very agitated and stressed, and as if he was trying to keep his voice low at the same time. He appeared to be planning something. It was just generally very suspicious behaviour. After about 5 more minutes he came out. He looked surprised and uneasy to see me, and almost theateningly asked how long I had been standing there for. I didn’t want to seem like I was intruding on his private affairs, so I said I had just gotten there, and after seeing the relieved look on his face I went in. Although we were pretty close, neither I, nor any of the other staff who knew him well, were aware that Mohamed was planning to go on a personal trip to India. He never mentioned it to us, though he commented to me on many occasions about how well it worked to have his family living in India while he was working in Queensland. The thing which striked me as odd about that sentence was that he was saying it was convenient, and not something like good or bad, for example. These occurrences have contributed to my belief that Mohamed is involved in suspicious activity regarding his extremist Islamic views.