For some, the internet is merely a hiding place — a web of secret corridors
where all manner of shameful deeds unfold. But the police never expected
that it might become a strategic platform where two groups of society's
outcasts, terrorists and child sex abusers, could meet to exchange
operational secrets.
The realisation that there might be something in common between violent Muslim
fanatics known for their supposed piety and sexual deviants who prey on
children has only slowly dawned on officers. Cracking the mystery of how
these worlds overlap is expected to improve understanding of the mindsets of
both types of criminals and has been hailed as a potentially vital
intelligence tool to undermine future terrorist plots. “A way of finding who
the extremists and terrorists are”, an anti-terror source said, “is to go
through the child-porn sites.”
The link might have remained unknown but for the case of a Muslim preacher
from the East End of London who in 2006 was being investigated by police
over his suspected links to a jihadi terrorist gunrunner.
To Scotland Yard's surprise, the 26-year-old Abdul Makim Khalisadar, a former
primary school assistant, was discovered to be downloading considerable
quantities of child pornography. A DNA test showed he was the wanted
“Whitechapel Rapist” who had violently attacked a woman in the street a year
earlier. He was jailed for ten years for rape and perverting justice.
Khalisadar, who has never been convicted of terrorist offences, and some
friends concocted a false alibi that he was preaching at the East London
Mosque when the attack happened. He was accused of possessing photographs of
child sex abuse but these 11 charges were allowed to lie on file.
Khalisadar's case came hot on the heels of the unexpected discovery of a few
dozen images of hard-core child pornography during a raid on a suspected
Muslim terrorist's home during a separate investigation. It was enough to
convince some officers that they had discovered a potentially important link.
But an investigation by The Times has discovered that the first
evidence actually came on the Continent within a few weeks of the 9/11
massacres. The unlikely setting was the Via Quaranta mosque in Milan. This
place of worship was, according to the book Al-Qaeda in Europe, by
the terrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino, expressly “built to create a new
gathering place for militants in the southern part of the city”. It was run
by the al-Qaeda recruiter Abdelkadar Mahmoud Ed Sayed.
During a crackdown on the mosque, police were astonished to discover
pornography on computer hard drives. But what was not reported then was that
the haul included images of children being sexually abused that were encoded
with messages as a clandestine method of communication. Ed Sayed was
sentenced to eight years in absentia in 2004 for terrorism-related offences.
Stefano Dambruoso, Italy's anti-terror magistrate, said: “In our experience in
investigating Islamic cells linked to al-Qaeda, they use pornographic images
simply to camouflage the content of their messages. They use the images — of
men, women and children — as an instrument to hide messages of quite a
different content.
“I would exclude the idea that they have paedophile tendencies. The most you
can attribute to them is a relationship between men and women different from
that of us Westerners, in which — as in many parts of the Arab world — wives
are often very young girls of 11, 12 or 13 who because of family
negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them. But that is
not paedophilia, it is a question of Arab culture.”
The Times has also found a case in Spain where an Islamic terror
suspect is accused of downloading child pornography, a case in Yorkshire
where child protection officers stumbled on a nail-bomb terror plotter, and
a case in Salford where officers discovered a chemistry student visiting
explosives websites and also downloading child abuse images. The Spanish
case, still before the courts, resulted from raids by the Guardia Civil
directed at breaking up a terrorist cell in October 2007. Thousands of
hardcore pornographic images of young children were found on home computers.
Abdelkader Ayachine, an Algerian in his forties working in Burgos, is in
custody awaiting trial for terrorism. He is accused of incitement to jihad
via the internet by recruiting volunteers to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and of sending money to prisoners belonging to an Islamic terrorist
movement. But he had a dual use for the internet, if another charge is
proven. Prosecutors say “he regularly downloads and transfers” from the
internet to the computer installed in his home “numerous video and
photographic files of child pornography, in which the main characters are
minors having sex among themselves or with adults”.
In police raids on him and five other suspects, investigators discovered bomb
manuals and text, audio and video in which he and the other suspects were
said to praise jihad. He is linked to the Islamist terrorist group that
killed 45 people in a suicide bomb attack in Casablanca in 2003.
One area that British anti-terror investigators are now keen to look at is the
startling similarity in the way that jihadis and paedophiles target
vulnerable young people, first befriending them and then slowly introducing
them to warped behaviour that comes to be seen as normal. “What we were
starting to see was a similarity in grooming that goes on in paedophilia and
grooming that goes on in extremism,” said the anti-terror source.
The source explained that both types of criminal also share a need for great
secrecy and indeed it is the paedophiles' status as outcasts as well as
their expertise in encryption techniques that may have first attracted the
terrorists. Hardline Muslim recruits are often given passwords and keycodes
to terrorism sites via internet chatrooms, although sometimes they come from
sympathisers in local mosques. But recently British police have managed to
crack some of the codes that prohibit outsiders from accessing the more
hardcore jihadi sites. Using child porn sites might be one way round this.
Some paedophiles have become adept at encrypting information and burying it so
deeply in the internet that no outsider can easily find it. Paedophiles then
meet in cyberspace and swap notes on how to reach the images. None is likely
to rush to police saying they suspect that they have spotted a terrorist
loitering on their child porn website.
Another area investigators will want to explore is the similarity between the
personalities of paedophiles and terrorists. “If they are going out, a lot
of time is spent by going to the mosque or going off to internet cafés,” the
source said.
Shahien Taj, the director of the Henna Foundation, which deals with domestic
violence against women and children, said that both terrorists and
paedophiles were obsessed with control and domination. She attacked the
hypocrisy of terrorists who claim to espouse religious motives on one hand
while degrading children on the other.
Not every terrorist downloading child pornography is a Muslim, though. The
British Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre was investigating
the case of paedophile Philip Thompson, known as the Librarian because he
lent out his 241,000 images of child abuse. They sent an intelligence file
to police about a suspected associate, Martyn Gilleard, 31, a forklift truck
driver and Hitler enthusiast from Goole on Humberside.
When officers turned up looking for child abuse images, they found 39,000 of
them. But they also stumbled across Gilleard's stash of machetes, swords,
bullets, gunpowder and nail bombs. He wanted to start a race war.
There is another case involving a white man that may be telling. Edward
Mattison, a 21-year-old chemistry student from Salford, was jailed in 2006
after he admitted explosives offences. He created homemade bombs using
chemicals including a deadly substance known as “Mother of Satan”, used in
the London bombings and by Palestinian suicide bombers. He admitted offences
relating to seven images of child pornography, though his lawyer said this
happened just once through curiosity. He was never accused of terrorism.
Through glimpses of these characters, a pattern can be seen: the same kind of
obsessive, sometimes paranoid, individual who becomes skilled in locating
the rotten fruit of the internet, from bombmaking instructions to child
pornography.
Just as the paedophiles have been getting cleverer at hiding their abuse
images, the authorities have been raising their technological game. But it
is feared that clues to terror plots may have escaped police attention
because of a lack of communication between Scotland Yard's child protection
and anti-terrorism specialists.
“It's worth researching this [link between terrorism and child pornography]
further because we will get an operational strategy with the paedophile unit
when they are infiltrating a paedophile site,” the source said.
“If we are now seeing that they are using these kind of sites as a
smokescreen, as a safe haven, they will never think we are cops.”
