ISLAMIC extremists were forced to call off a London conference commemorating the third anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on America yesterday when the owners of the venue cancelled the booking after consulting police.

The meeting was due to be held by the Al-Muhajiroun group at Friends House, a hall in Euston Road, central London. Those attending would have heard speeches by the group’s leader, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, and watched videos about the conflicts in Chechnya, Palestine, Kashmir and Afghanistan.

Anjem Choudary, a spokesman for the group, told a press conference before the meeting was scheduled to take place yesterday, that a Muslim flag would fly over Downing Street and that the 9/11 attacks had divided the world into supporters and opponents of Islam.

Last night a spokesman for the Quaker-run Friends House confirmed the conference had been cancelled on Friday night. He said it had been booked under the name of the Birmingham Youth Forum, and Friends House only discovered the real identity of the meeting’s organisers after approaching the police for help.

“I am angry with the British authorities. If they want to proscribe us, then they should proscribe us, not treat us in this way,” Omar said. Scotland Yard denied putting pressure on Friends House to cancel the meeting.

Other events to mark the day included an address by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the mosque of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He revealed he “was hoping to set up a national forum in which the anxieties of Muslim communities may be expressed and freely discussed”.

Americans yesterday marked the 9/11 anniversary with sombre commemorations and a last-minute flurry of lawsuits to beat a legal deadline.

President George W Bush ordered flags to be flown at half mast and led a national silence at 8.46am, the time the first plane struck the World Trade Center in New York.

Yesterday also marked the final opportunity for legal proceedings over compensation for the attacks to be lodged. The New York Port Authority, the owner of the World Trade Center, is seeking unspecified damages from Saudi Arabia for allegedly supporting Al-Qaeda before the 2001 attacks.

The Saudis are also being sued by Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street company that lost 658 employees in the attacks. They were also named in several other suits filed on Friday.

Yesterday morning Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the prime minister’s former special envoy to Iraq, acknowledged that one of Al-Qaeda’s aims in launching the 9/11 attacks had been to draw America into a conflict on Arab soil.

Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if this meant the allies had played into Al-Qaeda’s hands, he responded: “To some extent, we are suffering the consequences of that.”

Additional reporting: Tony Allen-Mills, Christopher Morgan

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Swine flu vaccine for all as drug rushed through
• Artificial sperm and the race to build a baby
• BBC jets out stars to tout for prizes