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| Britain |
| From Taliban camps to a London poison factory |
| 2005-04-14 |
| On a hot day in August 2001, a wiry, intense and thoroughly dangerous former Algerian policeman, then using the name Nadir Habra, checked for letters sent to him at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London, a meeting place for Islamic extremists. A registered letter from the Immigration and Nationality Department told Habra that his application for asylum, based on a false claim of fleeing persecution and made in an interview earlier that month, had been refused. He launched his application on his arrival in January, 2000. Habra - who had never been detained by immigration officials - treated the government decision with contempt. He did not bother to attend a subsequent appeal hearing but simply assumed another name, that of Kamel Bourgass, and continued his life in the shadows amongst north Africans living in London and other major British cities. Habra was meant to be subject to conditions of residence after August 2001 - which were worthless because no one knew where he was - and to report to immigration officials each month. He never did report and so became an "illegal absconder". However, he put the brown Immigration Service envelope to good use, using it later to store recipes for ricin and other deadly chemicals. In July 2002, he was arrested, as Bourgass, for shoplifting three pairs of jeans in a store in Romford in east London. He spent a night in jail and was fined £70 at Havering magistrates' court. He had a travel document in a separate name. Despite this Bourgass, by now an illegal over-stayer and a thief, was not linked to Nadir Habra. Nor was he detained. It is unclear if he was ever fingerprinted by the Immigration Service, but such was the shambles of the asylum system that fingerprinting would not have mattered. There was no mechanism for police to check the fingerprints they took of an Algerian thief against immigration records. Bourgass's next encounter with British authorities came in January 2003, in Manchester and ended in the murder of a police officer. Uniformed officers and Special Branch detectives went to a flat in Crumpsall Lane, in north Manchester, to arrest another Algerian who was deemed to warrant detention without trial under the now-abandoned special immigration system - the "Belmarsh" detentions. The detention suspect was expected to be in the flat with another Algerian. In fact, there were three in the flat. The third was Bourgass. During the raid, it became apparent that Bourgass was a man being sought by Scotland Yard concerning the discovery of recipes, ingredients and equipment to make poisons, including ricin, in a flat in Wood Green, north London. Sensing he was cornered, Bourgass grabbed a knife and lashed out. He failed to escape but delivered a fatal blow to Det Con Stephen Oake, a Special Branch officer. The Bourgass story, like so many in the modern terrorist era, has its roots in the training camps of Afghanistan run, until 2001, by the ruling Taliban regime and the al-Qa'eda movement of Osama bin Laden. The camps were full of thousands of men from north Africa, central Asia and Europe who had become radicalised by the perception of Muslim suffering and were willing to fight as part of a brotherhood, an Islamic mujahideen, in a jihad, or holy war, against perceived anti-Muslim oppressors, be they in Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir. Bin Laden and his lieutenants had the pick of the recruits for their specialist camps, where they groomed men willing to fight jihad through terrorism - men such as Bourgass, a "chemist". Algerian groups, battle-hardened from decades of resistance against their own government, were bin Laden's SAS. After the suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in September, 2001, a US-led coalition destroyed the Taliban regime. Without its support, residents of the camps dispersed. In early 2002, intelligence suggested that a network of north Africans in Britain, predominantly Algerians, was playing a central role in raising money for global terrorism and for fighters in Chechnya. This should have surprised no one. In the 1990s, the Algerians and the French had warned that Algerian extremists were drumming up support and funds in Britain, and particularly in the foreigner-friendly "Londonistan". Such people, though, were viewed by the Yard and MI5 as "other people's terrorists". The IRA was then the threat. However, in the spring of 2002, a major Scotland Yard operation was launched to disrupt the terror finance network. It would lead, eventually, to the arrest of more than 100 people over two years. Much of the activity centred on a group allegedly orchestrated by Abu Doha, whose extradition from Britain is sought by America for his part in a thwarted plot to bomb Los Angeles airport. Doha is also alleged to have run a large-scale procurement network for the jihad network from his flat Islington flat. Evidence from the Special Immigration Appeals Commission - monitors of the Belmarsh cases - suggests Doha came to London from the Afghan camps in the late 1990s and built a network which, with a resilience that security sources say is typical of the Algerian network, survived his arrest in 2001. The man in the Crumpsall Lane flat with Bourgass - whose detention was sought on a certificate by the Home Secretary and who cannot be named - was allegedly a veteran of the camps. In 2002, though, Bourgass was unknown to anti-terrorist branch and MI5 officers, as they worked their way through "a large network involved in the wholesale use of skimmed or false ID, using false credit cards and false bank accounts to obtain large amounts of money. "The people engaged in it lived modest lifestyles and had no appreciable visible wealth." The money went to the greater jihadi cause. The paper trail involved a web of multiple identities, bogus companies and bank accounts across Britain, traced to down-at-heel flats in London, Manchester, Yorkshire, Edinburgh and Dorset. In one direction, it led to an address at Ethel Coleman Way, Thetford, in Norfolk. There, detectives found photo-copies of handwritten recipes in Arabic script for poisons and explosives, including ricin and cyanide. Fingerprints, later shown to belong to Bourgass, were found on them. It was, a senior source said, "the first tangible sign this group was engaged in something more malevolent than fund-raising fraudulent activity". The Thetford find also fitted with a disturbing flow of intelligence about a potential Islamic extremist threat with "unconventional weaponry". Poison was clearly part of it. However, the discovery left many questions unanswered - not least the whereabouts of any poisons and the people making them. Bourgass was still unknown. Gaps in police knowledge, and the connection to Bourgass, were filled in by Mohamed "Frank" Meguerba, another member of the Algerian group who emerged as, effectively, an Islamic extremist "supergrass". An unemployed Algerian born in January 1968, Meguerba lived for a time in France and in the mid-1990s he was in Dublin, where in 1997 he married a young Irish student, Sharon Gray, now 31. Miss Gray told police she recalled him as a moderate Muslim who became radicalised after attending a mosque in Dublin. Following the classic pattern, Meguerba attended Afghan camps and gravitated towards London. Chasing the terrorist financing trail, anti-terror officers had raided "yet another" flat, in Worcester Avenue, Tottenham, north London, on Sept 8, 2002, before the Thetford find. Unexpectedly, they found Meguerba there. He was initially detained under the Terrorism Act but, eventually, released on police bail. He immediately fled the country and now police believe he was a key organiser of the poison plot. Meguerba was detained by the Algerians in December. In interviews there, and with Yard officers who visited subsequently, he disclosed that Nadir Habra/Kamel Bourgass was one of al-Qa'eda's prominent poison makers. In legal argument in the Old Bailey ricin trial, which was not heard by the jury, Nigel Sweeney, QC, prosecuting, said Meguerba "gave details of how he was recruited to Afghanistan and how he met Osama bin Laden on a number of occasions". "He said he had been tasked after his training to carry out attacks in Europe. He gives details about the network with Abu Doha at the top." Bourgass was said to have prepared poison with the help of Meguerba, at an address in Wood Green. Meguerba suggested that the poisons might be smeared on doors of cars and buildings in the Holloway Road area of north London. Meguerba also gave a description of his visits to Bourgass's "chemical factory", in Wood Green. On Jan 3 2003, police raided the flat above a chemist's shop at 352 High Road, Wood Green. Meguerba claimed "toxic poison" had been made in two Nivea cream pots. Police never found that missing poison but did find castor oil beans, the raw ingredient for ricin, apple pips used for cyanide, a grinder, mortar and pestle, rubber gloves, scales, thermometers, a funnel and blotting paper, all of which could make the poisons. After the Wood Green raid, a nationwide manhunt was launched for Nadir/Bourgass. A week later, Bourgass killed Stephen Oake. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |