Australia is investigating its own role in the flydubai terror attack

Australian police are now digging into whether the man who attacked a pilot on a Tel Aviv-bound flight was radicalised while he was living in Melbourne.

So here's what we know.

The Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team just confirmed it. That's the Australian Federal Police, Victoria Police and the domestic spy agency ASIO, all working together.

The man is Hamam al-Hammami, an Omani national. Six days ago he was the co-pilot on flydubai flight FZ1073, flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv with 174 people on board.

And here's what he did. He attacked the captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, with the cockpit's emergency crash axe.

Smit Machchhar was stabbed. Seriously wounded. But he still managed to open the cockpit door.

That let passengers and crew get in and overpower al-Hammami. Reserve pilots on board then landed the plane in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

Three days ago, the UAE's attorney general, Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, said investigators have determined this was a terrorist act.

Now, an Australian Federal Police spokesperson has confirmed the Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team is investigating the man's links to Australia, and says an update will come at an appropriate time.

So that's Australia's federal police confirming a counter-terrorism investigation into a man who already tried to hijack a plane.

Here's the background. Al-Hammami got an Australian student visa in 2014. He lived in Melbourne from about 2015 to 2017. Then he left the country, and his visa was cancelled in 2019.

And this matters: the ABC reports the visa wasn't cancelled over character concerns. It was cancelled because he was no longer enrolled in a course.

But here's the part that's harder to pin down. The Financial Times says two people familiar with the investigation told them al-Hammami visited mosques linked to extremism and extremist websites while he was in Australia. The same report says Australian intelligence held a file on him.

Reuters says it could not immediately verify that.

Two sources briefed on the investigation told Reuters al-Hammami studied at a university in Melbourne. Local media named it as RMIT University. RMIT told Reuters it had no comment. A deleted LinkedIn profile reportedly listed engineering study there too.

So the picture so far: two years in Melbourne, alleged visits to extremist websites and mosques linked to extremism, and a file already sitting with Australian intelligence. Nobody has said when, or whether, any radicalisation actually started.