British intelligence

Is MI5 foiling terror plots of 

its own hatching?

Nafeez Ahmed

Nafeez Ahmed

29 May, 2013

This weekend I had a short, sharp piece published in the Independent on Sunday (in print and online at Indy Voices) which argued that the banned Al Muhajiroun is still incubating terrorism on UK soil - but that the group has had a very murky connection to Britain's security services, and may still do so. Check it out here - 'Britain should prosecute terrorism suspects, not play shady games of geopolitics'.

Today, I'm elaborating on one dimension of that piece here in the wake of the stream of revelations concerning the role of MI5 in allegedly tracking/harassing the Woolwich attackers. This piece has more detail - on the evidence of Al Muhajiroun's unequivocal terror connections, and the credible evidence of its relationship to Britain's security services. It includes little known but credible choice info from an MI5 source and Bakri himself confirming the relationship:

Allegations broadcast last night on BBC Newsnight, based on a letter addressed to Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), claim that Woolwich suspect Michael "Mujahid" Adebolajo had been tortured by Kenyan authorities "at the behest of British intelligence."

The allegations compound questions already raised about why MI5 failed to prevent the horrifying attack despite both suspects having appeared on MI5 and MI6 "intelligence watch lists"; with Adebolajo himself having "featured in several counter-terrorist investigations" for the "last eight years". Various reports suggest he had been high on MI5's priority for the last three years, and even harassed to join up as an informant six months ago.

Defending criticisms of MI5, ISC chairman Sir Malcolm Rifkind told the BBC that the security service's record in the last few years had been "hugely impressive", as proven by the litany of plots foiled and successful terrorism prosecutions.

But the central role of the banned al-Qaeda linked group formerly known as Al Muhajiroun in almost every major UK terror plot - including Woolwich - demonstrates the murkiness of MI5's relationship with the banned group.

One in five terrorist convictions in the UK for more than a decade were for people who were either members of or had links to Al Muhajiroun. Choudary himself admitted to knowing Adebolajo as someone who "attended our meetings and my lectures." Adebolajo was a regular at Al Muhajiroun's Woolwich high street dawah (propagation) stall, was "tutored" by Al-Muhajiroun founding chair Syrian cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed himself, and had attended the group's meetings between 2005 and 2011.

Despite proscription, Al Muhajiroun has continued to function with impunity in new incarnations, most recently under the banner of Izhar Ud-Deen-il-Haq - run under the tutelage of British-born Anjem Choudary.

Al Muhajiroun's intelligence connections started in 1996 when Omar Bakri founded the group. According to John Loftus, a former US Army Intelligence Officer and Justice Department prosecutor, three senior Al Muhajiroun figures at the time - Bakri, Abu Hamza, and Haroon Rashid Aswat - had been recruited by MI6 that year to facilitate Islamist activities in the Balkans. The objective was geopolitical expansion - destabilising former Soviet republics, sidelining Russia and paving the way for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline protected by incoming NATO 'peacekeeping' bases.

On 10th February 1998, Bakri and Choudary issued a "fatwa" declaring "a full scale war of Jihad" on the US, Britain, and "non-Muslim governments... which will be the responsibility of every Muslim around the world to participate in."

In 2000, Bakri admitted to training British Muslims to learn "firearms and explosives use, surveillance and other skills" and "would be expected to join a jihad" abroad. He also boasted: "The British government knows who we are. MI5 has interrogated us many times. I think now we have something called public immunity. There is nothing left. You can label us ... put us behind bars, but it's not going to work."

In the summer preceding 9/11, the FBI flagged up the unusual presence of Al Muhajiroun activists at Arizona flight schools, many with terror connections, including one described as a close bin Laden associate.

Labour Party MP Andrew Dismore told Parliament about a month after 9/11 that Bakri's private security firm, Sakina Security Services, sends hundreds of Britons "overseas for jihad training with live arms and ammunition", including to camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Though Sakina was raided by police and shut down, Bakri and Hamza were not even arrested, let alone charged or prosecuted.

In 2003, two Al Muhajiroun members carried out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Lead 7/7 bomber Mohamed Sidique Khan, an Al Muhajiroun member who had been friends with the Tel Aviv bombers, had even travelled to Israel weeks before that attack. Khan later underwent explosives training in a camp set up by Al Muhajiroun's British and American members in Pakistan.

A year before 7/7, Bakri warned of a "well-organised group" linked to al-Qaeda "on the verge of launching a big operation" against London. Months before the attacks, Bakri told his followers in internet lectures: "I believe the whole of Britain has become Dar al-Harb (land of war). The kuffar [non-believer] has no sanctity for their own life or property." Muslims are "obliged" to "join the jihad... wherever you are", and suicide bombings are permitted because "Al-Qaeda... have the emir."

But around the same time, the Wall Street Journal's Pulitizer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind was told by an MI5 official that the cleric: 

"had helped MI5 on several of its investigations." 

Bakri confirmed the same in an interview with Suskind years later from Tripoli, Lebanon, where he now resides. As Suskind wrote in his book, The Way of the World:

"Bakri enjoyed his notoriety and was willing to pay for it with information he passed to the police... It's a fabric of subtle interlocking needs: the [British authorities] need be in a backchannel conversation with someone working the steam valve of Muslim anger; Bakri needs health insurance."

Bakri maintains regular contact with his British followers from Lebanon. Why would MI5 and MI6 retain the services of someone so dangerous given the overwhelming evidence of his centrality to violent radicalisation? Is MI5, through Al Muhajiroun, hatching many of the plots it lays claim to successfully foiling - as the FBI has been doing in the US?

It is the ISC's job to find out whether this strategy has repeatedly backfired - the committee must ask MI5 probing questions not simply about pre-Woolwich intelligence "defects", but about the security service's longstanding relationship with the extremist network incubating terror on UK soil.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security expert who writes for The Guardian at his Earth Insight blog. The author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (2006). His work was used by the Coroner's Inquiry into 7/7 and the 9/11 Commission.

The Woolwich murder

Woolwich suspect tortured "at behest of British intelligence", Parliamentary Intelligence Committee is told
Police's arrest of witness claiming Woolwich attacker was radicalised by torture, sexual abuse and harassment was "ordered by MI5"

Nafeez Ahmed

nafeezahmed.

28 May, 2013

A letter to the UK Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee by a childhood friend of one of the Woolwich attackers claims that the suspect was subjected to "systematic torture and sexual abuse" by Kenyan troops on behalf of Britain's security services. 

The letter - exclusive excerpts of which are quoted below - is authored by Ibrahim Hassan, otherwise known as "Abu Nusaybah", who was interviewed by Richard Watson on BBC Newsnight claiming that MI5 had been harassing Woolwich suspect Michael "Mujahid" Adebolajo to join the agency as an informant six months ago. Hassan was arrested by Metropolitan Police under the Terrorism Act 2000 immediately after his BBC interview, and is currently in custody at Southwark Police Station.

A copy of this letter was obtained by this author today, photographs of which are posted at the end of this report, which also contains an exclusive interview with Ibrahim Hassan's lawyer with previously unknown details of Adebolajo's alleged ordeal.

Addressed to chairman of the committee Sir Malcolm Rifkind, and prepared with the assistance of his solicitors, Hassan's letter insists on his innocence of involvement in terrorism activities, and his condemnation of Adebolajo's "shocking acts." Arguing that it is in "the public interest that everything that can be done to prevent such atrocities in the future should be the government's top priority", Hassan says that he believes "two fundamental factors" explain this behaviour:

"... the first factor was the systematic torture and sexual abuse he was subjected to by Kenyan troops which he believed was at the behest of British intelligence. Michael was told by his captors that this action by them was at the behest of UK authorities. He could not forget or forgive them for this connivance in this brutal treatment of him, when all he was trying to do was build a new life for himself outside of the UK."

After his return to the UK, Hassan writes that Adebolajo "informed me that he was subject to further harassment and intimidation by the security services in order to pressure him into working for them as an agent." The letter implores the committee "to investigate any connection between the UK and Kenyan authorities in the mistreatment of Michael Adebolajo whilst in their hands. I am witness to the fact that the Michael I knew ceased to exist after his treatment in Kenya."

The letter also claims that counter terrorism police officers did not deny that the arrest was ordered by MI5. It points out that: 

"at a hearing video link on the 26th May 2013 with Westminster Magistrates Court where the police sought permission from the court to extend my time in custody, my barrister asked if my arrest was ordered by the intelligence services [and] the police refused to deny this possibility." 

Hassan adds that he believes his arrest "was ordered by the intelligence services because I made this information public."

Adebolajo was one of seven men arrested by Kenyan authorities during a trip to the country in November 2010. Kenyan police at the time accused the men of travelling to Somalia to join the al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist group al-Shabaab. His family and friends claimed that he had been detained without charge and tortured before his return to Britain.

The claims have been corroborated by a London-based human rights organisation, Cage Prisoners. Chairman of the group, Moazzem Begg, said the day after Hassan's arrest:

"Is it a coincidence that Abu Nusaybah was arrested yesterday at the BBC studios right after he gave an interview which described the MI5 harassment and torture in Kenya - which British intelligence knew about and quite possibly was complicit in - of Michael Adebolajo?"

Begg confirmed that Adebolajo had "approached us around the time about it and we referred him to lawyers as a result."

Now Begg's confirmation is supported with further details by Ibrahim Hassan's lawyer, Mohammed Akunjee of Soni & Kaur Solicitors in an exclusive interview with this author.

Akunjee said that his client told him that Michael Adebolajo had been tortured in Kenya under the orders of Britain's security services. He added that this key claim put forth by Hassan and recorded during his BBC Newsnight interview was inexplicably not aired on the first programme. Instead, Newsnight waited until the release of Hassan's letter to air the recording today, 28th May.

Akunjee said that, "Abu Nusayba told me that 6 months ago Michael Adebolajo had turned up at his house distraught and explained to him that he was being harassed and hounded by MI5 officers.

"They had been good friends for many years - since before each of them had converted to Islam - which is why Adebolajo confided in him. Adebolajo told him that during his trip to Kenya to undertake an Islamic studies course, he had been arrested by Kenyan authorities on the pretext that he was trying to collaborate with al Shabaab.

"He said that after being detained in a holding cell for hours, a number of Kenyan security officers turned up at his cell and beat him severely all over to interrogate him although he protested his innocence.

"When Adebolajo demanded to have contact with the British embassy, the Kenyan officers laughed and told him, 'Who do you think asked us to do this to you?'

"One of the officers then stripped him and grabbed his penis. He told him, 'If you don't talk, I'm going to fuck you.' As Adebolajo was innocent, there was nothing he could say. According to my client, Adebolajo said to him that the Kenyan officers then proceeded to do 'unimaginable things to him which he couldn't bear talking about'."

"Eventually, Adebolajo was put on trial in a Kenyan court, but the case collapsed due to lack of evidence. Back in the UK, his family lobbied the Foreign Office and eventually the public pressure forced the British authorities into action and the Kenyan authorities were compelled to free him."

However, according to Akunjee, as soon as Adebolajo arrived back in the UK, "he was greeted by MI5 officers who interrogated him at the airport."

Although Hassan is a former member of the banned extremist group Al Muhajiroun, Akunjee points out that it is because his client shared similar experiences to his friend Michael Adebolajo that the latter felt comfortable with confiding in him.

Akunjee also said: 

"I'm a criminal defence lawyer and have to assess the cogency of evidence and information on a daily basis. I can say that Ibrahim Hassan's testimony on this issue appears plausible - he had no motive to lie, in fact, he knew that coming on record with this information could backfire for him due to his background. I think his testimony is credible."

On Newsnight's earlier decision to not air allegations on the crucial link between the security services and Adebolajo's torture, Akunjee said: 

"The specific allegations that my client related suggesting that the UK security services had authorised Kenyan security officers to torture him on behalf of British intelligence was not broadcast by Newsnight, even though it was part of the recorded interview." 

Despite Newsnight's broadcast of that excerpt today, questions remain as to what prompted the editors to avoid doing so earlier.

Akunjee further raised questions as to why British police chose to arrest Ibrahim Hassan under the Terrorism Act after the Newsnight interview, rather than beforehand.

"They had ample opportunity to arrest him days before if they believed he had some connection to the Woolwich attack. My client is concerned that the authorities didn't want this damning testimony to be broadcast, and when it was, to ensure that further revelations would not be publicly released. My client believes he is being punished not for terrorism, but for airing unsavoury and embarrassing allegations about the security services."