Senior Australian police official attacks on ombudsman

A senior Australian police official launched a blistering attack against his senior colleagues on Friday, accusing them of character assassination, vendettas, racism and more.

The New South Wales (NSW) Deputy Commissioner Nick Kaldas told a NSW parliamentary inquiry into the secret police operation that his personal and professional life had been turned upside down.

"I have suffered much and gained little," he said, as he delivered a scathing attack on state ombudsman Bruce Barbour.

Kaldas was one of 114 police officers who were target of a secret police anti-corruption operation, including surveillance and phone tapping over two years.

The operation was run by now NSW police commissioner Andrew Scipione and Kaldas' now equal ranking deputy Catherine Burn, a fierce Kaldos rival within the NSW police executive, according to many reports.

Although cleared of any wrongdoing after the covert Operation Mascot/Florida began in 2000, Kaldas' career stalled despite a shining record, including heading up the undercover and homicide squad, as well drafting key structural reforms for Australia's biggest police force.

"My experience with the Ombudsman was that having made a complaint in late 2012 and providing a material and a written submission in 2013, I was called down for a hearing on the 5th of September 2014," Kaldas told the inquiry which broadcast live on television Friday.

"I attended to face an onslaught, a concerted attack on my integrity and credibility. An enormous amount of material was put to me and yet again my emails phone records, diary, notebooks etc were invaded and quoted to me," he said adding that "I felt that the horrors of Mascot/Florida were happening all over again."

"It felt to me like this was a well planned attack to silence me as one of the main complainants," he said.

Kaldas said that he had "not done anything that would justify this level of intense, intrusive targeting."

"Yet again my privacy has been utterly invaded with operation prospect where my diaries, my notebooks, my emails my phone records have all been seized by the Ombudsman, and yet again the justification for this invasion of privacy are completely out of proportion to what is alleged," he said.

"We the police could not treat criminals this way -- and neither should we."

Kaldas said the methodology used by the Ombudsman to him is similar to that used by Joseph McCarthy on whom he alleged were communists or sympathizers in the 1950s in the United States.

The Egyptian-born Coptic Christian who came to Australia with his family as an 8-year-old also said the code name used by the secret police operation was "guido" -- which he said was racist, as it is one of many derogatory terms used in Australia for non- Anglo Saxons.

He said he was outraged by his treatment by the Ombudsman last year after receiving the highest international security clearances in his field.

Deputy commissioner Burn, who Kaldas suggested was over-zealous when in co-charge of Operation Mascot/Florida, admitted members of her team had obtained phone-tap warrants from judges without the necessary proof.

She responded to questions if that was "serious" and "shocking" by replying "yes." But she denied instigating the applications for the warrants based on now admitted falsified allegations against some of those who phones were tapped.

The inquiry continues on Monday. Endi