By ninemsn staff and wires
A suspect under surveillance by Australian counter-terror operatives has trained overseas with Kashmir separatists Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), terrorism expert Clive Williams has told the Nine Network's Today.
Two terror suspects in Sydney have been liaising with others in Melbourne over potential terrorism targets, he said.
"LET runs training camps which people attend," Dr Williams said. "People travel to Pakistan … to the training camps.
"They can obviously get a basic level of training in quite a short period of time and then they can return to their home location."
Dr Williams said he believed the suspects were second-generation Australian citizens.
"One of the persons apparently was identified by an American informant as having attended an LET camp in Pakistan, and they've been talking to others in Melbourne apparently about what sort of targets they could attack," he said.
"So it's sort of very early stages and that's why the government wants to change the law in the way it does."
Dr Williams later said police conducted three raids in Sydney in June in relation to the threat and the suspects had identified targets in Melbourne.
"I believe that (the suspects) had videoed some potential targets in Melbourne," he said on ABC radio.
Prime Minister John Howard rushed an amendment to existing terrorism offences into parliament yesterday after the national security committee was briefed on a potential threat.
Mr Howard would not detail the nature of the threat for fear of it putting future police or ASIO operations at risk.
The Senate will be recalled today to rush through the laws.
With the support of Labor, the laws passed the House of Representatives and will be dealt with by the Senate this afternoon. The legislation will immediately give police greater powers to arrest terror suspects.
More extensive anti-terrorism laws, which the government has been negotiating with the states and territories, could also be introduced into the parliament immediately if the legislation gets a final tick of approval from enough premiers.
All states and territories except the ACT on Thursday gave the green light to Mr Howard's anti-terrorism changes hammered out at the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), after he agreed to better civil liberties protections.
The legislation will make it into the parliament once the states and territories sign off on an agreement to refer their powers to the commonwealth.
The bill also has to be ticked off by the government's backbench committee, as well as the coalition's joint party room.
Earlier on Today, Neil Fergus, the former security chief for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, said the National Threat Assessment Centre (NTAC) had not yet elevated the current threat level from medium to high.
Mr Fergus said that would only happen if an attack was believed to be imminent.
He said the community could gain some confidence from the immediate and bipartisan support from Opposition leader Kim Beazley.
"The reality is ... there is new intelligence of a current threat," he told Today.
"Another thing that people should be mindful of is that the National Threat Assessment Centre has not raised the threat alert. So it still stays at medium."
"For the threat level to go up, it means there is intelligence of an imminent attack.
Meanwhile, Melbourne's The Age reported the threat did not originate in Victoria and was not directed at the state.
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