Government departments pointed the finger of blame at one another; politicians complained that the police and the spymasters did not investigate him properly; Scotland Yard moaned about MI5 and vice-versa. Detectives felt that the Crown Prosecution Service let them down; the CPS moaned that the court system was stacked against them. The judges retorted that they did not make the laws; if anyone was to blame it was the civil servants and politicians at Westminster. The blame game went round and round as Tony Blair banged the table in exasperation.
Every chance there had been to pursue Abu Hamza seemed to have been missed, wasted or blocked.
For more than twenty years there had been a catalogue of bureaucratic foul-ups and a lack of resolve by the British authorities to tackle him, even when presented with a clear opportunity to do so.
The first occasion was in 1980, when Abu Hamza was arrested as an illegal immigrant and brought before the courts for overstaying his visa. Had his case been subjected to a proper investigation, potential offences under the Marriage Act, the Births and Deaths Registration Act and the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act could have been discovered. But the validity of his marriage to Valerie Traverso and the truth about his claim to be the father of her baby daughter were not examined.
He came to the attention of the police again in the mid-1980s, when his bullying behaviour began to alarm the imams and trustees of a number of mosques. Members of the Muslim community in Brighton approached Sussex police, and at Regent’s Park mosque in London trustees took court action to keep him away from the building.
When he returned from Afghanistan and Bosnia in the mid-1990s there was further trouble in Luton. But he was left to carry on with his activities and to seize control at Finsbury Park.
Abdulkadir Barkatullah, one of the management committee ousted by Abu Hamza, said he and community representatives went to the police seven times to complain about assaults and extremist activities inside the mosque. No action was taken.
The Prime Minister had urged the Muslim community to do more about the scourge of extremism within its own ranks but, Barkatullah said, “When we did do precisely that with Abu Hamza, we were ignored.”
If those who raised the alarm at home were overlooked, then foreign intelligence agencies were discounted. Those of France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands all accused Abu Hamza of being the ringmaster of a terrorist operation. The French and the Algerians had spies inside the mosque, and were horrified at what they uncovered. Egypt wanted to swap a British prisoner for Abu Hamza. All shared their findings with Whitehall, but nothing happened.
Senior sources now admit that the British response was coloured by a belief that the French were wildly over-reacting to the Islamist threat. These same sources agree that Britain underestimated the real menace of Abu Hamza, and did not devote enough resources to investigating his network until 9/11 jolted every Western power.
It seems a lame excuse that British security authorities needed to see skyscrapers collapsing in New York to realise the danger of Islamic fundamentalists, when they had damning proof of Abu Hamza’s direct involvement with terrorists in Yemen in 1998, when he had bought a satellite phone and supplied £500 of airtime for the kidnappers of 16 Western holidaymakers.
Irrefutable evidence of his calls to and from the kidnappers’ leader was gathered by GCHQ, the British Government’s intelligence listening post. But in Britain telephone intercept evidence cannot be produced as evidence in the criminal courts.
A leading counter-terrorism investigator says today that he has no doubt that were such evidence admissible, Abu Hamza would have been prosecuted for his role in the Yemen abductions and deaths.
Scotland Yard did send a file to the CPS in March 1999, but it was rejected, marked “insufficient evidence”.
The FBI thought differently. To Whitehall’s embarrassment, American investigators have announced that they will use the evidence harvested by GCHQ and other British agencies should they get the chance to prosecute Abu Hamza in the US.
The tragic events in Yemen did lead to Abu Hamza’s brief arrest for four days in March 1999. His home was thoroughly searched, and a large number of audio and video recordings of his sermons were confiscated. They included three videotapes of sermons that would be held in court seven years later as amounting to the offence of “soliciting to murder”. But at the time, the police took no action.
In one recording, Abu Hamza told his followers that they had to fight, kill and die, because “no drop of liquid is loved by Allah more than the liquid of blood”.
Detectives, who say they were focusing on the Yemen investigation, decided that no offence had been committed. The content of the sermons formed no part of their report to the CPS, and the tapes were returned to Abu Hamza — who in turn insists that he took this as a clear signal that nothing he was saying could be deemed to be illegal.
Also taken from him in that search in 1999 were the eleven volumes of the Encyclopaedia of Afghani Jihad. Seven years later these would be described to an Old Bailey jury as a terrorist manual. They, too, were returned.
The police signalled their concern about his activities by permanently confiscating two passports found in his home during the raid. One, in his own name, had expired; the second, in the name Adam Ramsey Eaman, had been used by Abu Hamza to travel to Bosnia, where he met Arab mujahidin fighters in 1995. No prosecution ensued from his possession of this document, because he obtained it legally after changing his name by deed poll.
If Abu Hamza used sleight of hand to change his identity, others at the mosque engaged in naked fraud to purloin identities and money, and to falsify benefit claims. Surely someone should have thought it strange that so many young men, of similar ages, were turning up with near-identical claims for welfare and housing, and using the same address? Islamist militants were jailed for massive credit card frauds which could be traced back to Finsbury Park, but Abu Hamza was not even questioned. The British authorities were clearly aware that he was involved in fundraising for terrorism — not least because he confessed it to his contacts in the intelligence services.
Some of his emissaries were stopped leaving Britain carrying large amounts of money. James Ujaama, who has struck a deal to testify against Abu Hamza in the US, was questioned at Heathrow airport with a suitcase full of cash days before the 9/11 attacks. He told officials that he was flying to Pakistan and then crossing into Afghanistan to deliver the funds for the establishment of a Taliban school.
US investigators claim to have obtained further evidence that Abu Hamza was directly bankrolling al-Qaeda’s Darunta camp, which specialised in explosives and poisons training and where the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and others from Finsbury Park were sent. But he was never charged with financing terrorism.
Abu Hamza was not simply a fundraiser for terrorist camps. He provided a production line of recruits for al-Qaeda and others to train as jihadi fighters and suicide bombers. In the camps, his name was well-known; he was someone who could refer candidates to the highest echelons of al-Qaeda’s leadership. When Ujaama fell ill on a visit to Afghanistan he was treated by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s personal physician and second-in-command of al-Qaeda.
British law enforcement agencies say they knew about Abu Hamza’s activities, but were powerless to stop him. It was not until late 2001, when the controversial Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act was passed into law, that sending someone abroad to undergo terrorist training and instruction became a criminal offence. Yet even after the new laws were introduced, Abu Hamza’s followers continued to disappear off to camps run by outlawed groups, and still nobody in authority laid a finger on him.
David Blunkett, out of government since November 2005 and with time to reflect on his stewardship of the fight against terrorism, believes that the sinister nature of Abu Hamza was not appreciated. “There was still an assumption when I took office as Home Secretary (in 2001) that he was a bigmouth and was worth tracking but wasn’t at the centre of events,” he says.
Blunkett is angry to have learnt since that the intelligence services never showed him “the detailed trail” of networks, the personal history and the high-level contacts that would have indicated that Abu Hamza was “a real threat and a danger”.
He freely admits that the British authorities at all levels were nervous about taking action against Abu Hamza. They saw the preacher not as a terrorist suspect but as an outspoken religious leader of a minority faith, and feared that any action against him would be labelled as Islamophobic and an abuse of human rights.
“It is clear that for all sorts of reasons there was a reluctance in our society to believe that it was possible for a faith to be misused in that way,’ says Blunkett, adding: “It is also clear now that there were opportunities for having taken action. By putting the jigsaw together, it is possible for us to realise that this man was a danger.”
Before 2001, no one considered that Islamist terror was a threat to Britain, and up until that year the anti-terrorist effort in the UK was still directed at fighting dissident elements of Irish republicanism.
It is easily forgotten now, but the Real IRA waged a destructive bombing campaign in London during 2000 and 2001. Just five weeks before 9/11 a Real IRA car bomb exploded on Ealing Broadway, west London, injuring several people.
American investigators were aghast at how Abu Hamza was treated. They were sick of handing information to British agencies only to see him being allowed to continue preaching hatred in front of the cameras. One senior official in the US Department of Justice said: “We just did not understand what was going on in London. We wondered to ourselves whether he was an MI5 informer, or was there some secret the British were not trusting us with? He seemed untouchable.”
Exasperated US security agencies decided that if Britain were not going to act, then they would. Hence the warrant handed over by FBI agents stationed at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in May 2004.
Some in the British Government continued to dither.
Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, thought it would look bad for Britain to surrender a British citizen to the Americans without making any effort to try him in Britain. This argument won the day. Britain would not hand Abu Hamza over if it could be proven that he had committed serious crimes here.
The police were instructed to build a case, and to do it swiftly. The obvious place to look again for evidence was in the thousands of recordings of his sermons recovered in the search of his home in 1999.
In August 2004, Abu Hamza was formally arrested inside Belmarsh jail and taken across London to be interviewed at Paddington Green police station. Two months later he was charged with using his sermons to incite murder and stir up racial hatred. His lawyers pointed out that police had examined some of this evidence before and handed it back to him. He himself said: “If I was not already in prison, I would have laughed.”
America wanted to put Abu Hamza on trial for recruiting, financing and directing terrorism, charges that could see him jailed for up to a hundred years.
But British prosecutors chose to intervene and to accuse him of lesser offences, mostly under a century-and-a-half-old statute.
The central charge was that he had crossed the boundaries of freedom of expression — the criminal equivalent of ignoring a “Keep off the grass” sign. Somehow Britain managed to make it look as if Abu Hamza was getting off lightly.
Extracted from The Suicide Factory: Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park Mosque by Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory To be published by HarperCollins on June 19, price £7.99 Available from Times Books First for £7.19 (0870 160 8080) www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
© Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory
