**Five men convicted of a terrorist conspiracy in the Australian city of Sydney have been handed jail sentences of between 17 and 21 years.**The men were found guilty last year of charges such as possessing bomb-making instructions and explosives chemicals.
Prosecutors said they were plotting violent jihadist attacks in protest at Australia’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The men cannot be named for legal reasons.
Their trial was the longest in Australian history.
‘Contempt’
Justice Anthony Whealy of the New South Wales Supreme Court, who passed sentence, said the men were motivated by “intolerant, inflexible religious conviction”.
They had shown contempt for the Australian government, its leaders and laws, he said.
The BBC’s Nick Bryant in Sydney says the arrests in 2005 followed tip offs from hardware store and gun shop owners.
Their suspicions had been raised when the men started to order unusually high amounts of chemicals and guns.
Prosecutors said one defendant had attended a training camp in Pakistan of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group and had set up a paramilitary style camp in rural New South Wales to train three of the other men.
“There is no reason to doubt that, absent the intervention of the authorities, the plan would have come to fruition in early 2006 or thereabouts,” Justice Whealy said in a purpose-built courthouse.
The court heard there was overwhelming evidence the men wanted to create “at the very least, serious damage to property” and posed a “serious risk” to the public.
Australia is a close ally of the United States. It was among the first to commit troops to US-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It has not suffered a major peacetime attack on home soil, but 95 Australians have been killed in militant bombings in neighbouring Indonesia since 2001.