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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Bakri to set up shop in Lebanon |
| 2005-09-01 |
| Radical imam Omar Bakri Mohammed, whose pro-Jihad agitation led British authorities last week to ban him from their shores, now is likely to set up a new base in either Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates, according to a close associate. British officials disclosed last week that Bakri, founder of a controversial and now dissolved militant group known as Al Muhajiroun (The Immigrants) had been sent a letter informing him he would not be allowed to re-enter the U.K., his longtime country of residence. The Syrian-born preacher had left Britain for what initially was described as a vacation to Lebanon shortly after a wave of deadly suicide bombings of London's transport system on July 7 and a second round of attempted attacks on July 21. In the wake of the attacks, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government promised to curb the activities of preachers like Bakri, either by ejecting them from Britain or taking them off the streets through new antiterror legislation or regulations. Bakri associate Abu Yahya, a Briton who described himself as a former Al Muhajiroun spokesman, told NEWSWEEK that when Bakri left for Lebanon, he "never planned to come back to the U.K. in the first place." Bakri's "ultimate aim" was to go to Pakistan, said Abu Yahya, who said that he and other British followers of Bakri were "in contact" with the imam. Now, however, Bakri is "most probably" going to stay in Lebanon, though it is possible he could also try to settle in the Persian Gulf emirates of Sharjah or Abu Dhabi, according to Abu Yahya, who is currently in Britain. "He's a world-renowned figure. He has an international following ... He's going to continue his duties wherever he is." Bakri was picked up by Lebanese authorities last week for questioning but was later released. Only days before his departure from London, Bakri, whose proclivity for outrageous statements made him a favorite target for Britain's raucous tabloids, declared that he would not inform the police if he knew that another cell of Muslim terrorists was planning a new attack on London. "I have said publicly, on the record, if I knew somebody was going to attack here, I will hold him, I will call the Muslims to hold him," Bakri told Britain's Channel 4 News, adding, "I would never tell the police. I am not working for the police. I would never, ever, tell the police about any Muslim. It is God-forbidden." Bakri, nicknamed the "Tottenham Ayatollah" or "Tottenham Taliban" by the tabloids (after the North London neighborhood where he operated Al Muhajiroun from a government-subsidized industrial park), has been a focus of controversy in Britain since the early 1990s when he notoriously labeled Prime Minister John Major a legitimate assassination target. One of Al Muhajiroun's principal objectives, as outlined to journalists by Bakri, was to replace Britain's democratic government with a regime based on Sharia, Islamic religious law. In conversations with a NEWSWEEK reporter before the 9/11 attacks, Bakri said he once met someone he believed was Osama bin Laden at a college lecture in Saudi Arabia, and Bakri also acknowledged distributing some of bin Laden's publicity statements. But after 9/11, Bakri claimed to the same reporter that he did not remember meeting bin Laden. Later, Bakri’s group issued written statements claiming he never met the 9/11 mastermind. According to British press accounts, Bakri also claimed to have given religious guidance to two U.K. citizens who traveled to Israel to carry out a suicide bombing that killed four people, including the bombers. Following the first wave of public-transport bombings in London last month, Bakri was quoted as blaming the bombings on the British people and accused Blair and Britons who voted him into office of fostering a "cycle of bloodshed." A native of Syria who turned up in Britain after being expelled from Saudi Arabia as a religious extremist in the mid-1980s, Bakri was granted asylum by British authorities based on the likelihood that he would be ill-treated if he were forced to go back to Syria or Saudi Arabia. However, a British counterterrorism official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, said British authorities decided recently to revoke his U.K. residence permit and ban him from the country on the grounds that his presence would not be "conducive to the public good." Bakri was one of several prominent radical Muslim preachers and activists whose use of Britain as a base to promote jihadi ideology--and allegedly to encourage the recruitment of jihadi fighters--caused some foreign intelligence and security officials to label the U.K. capital "Londonistan" because of its supposedly welcoming attitude toward the radicals. Over the years, according to U.K. security sources, Bakri has worked closely with other U.K.-based radicals whom authorities have suspected of loose sympathies or connections to Al Qaeda and other violent militants. Among Bakri's alleged associates: Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed former prayer leader at London's notorious Finsbury Park Mosque (who is now awaiting trial on U.K. terrorism charges as well as facing a U.S. extradition request), and Abdullah al-Faisal, a Jamaican-born London imam now imprisoned on terrorism-related charges who investigators believe may have been in contact with both unsuccessful shoe-bomber Richard Reid as well as one or more of the July 7 London public-transport bombers. At the height of his activism in the years before 9/11, Bakri's Al Muhajiroun had affiliates or contacts in both Pakistan and the United States. According to the U.S. investigations of 9/11, in July 2001 an FBI agent in Phoenix wrote a memo urging FBI headquarters to investigate whether an influx of Arab students at U.S. flight schools suggested that Islamic terrorists might be trying to infiltrate the American aviation system. One focus of the FBI memo was an allegation that an Al Muhajiroun member was attending aviation courses in Phoenix and also allegedly organizing pro-jihad rallies. According to congressional investigators, Al Muhajiroun's spiritual leader--presumably Omar Bakri Mohammed--issued several religious decrees against the United States including "one mentioning airports as a possible target." A sensitive U.K. source also indicated that Al Muhajiroun members were among the principal targets of Operation Crevice, a police antiterror investigation that led to the spring 2004 arrests of a group of British residents of Pakistani extraction on terrorism-plot charges. According to the source, a former U.S. recruit to Al Muhajiroun, Mohammed Junaid Babar, became a U.S. government witness against the British plotters. U.S. government sources say the names of two July 7 London subway bombing suspects, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Jermaine Lindsay, turned up tangentially during the Operation Crevice investigation, whose principal defendants do not go on trial until next year. U.S. counterterrorism officials say that after Khan was identified as one of the suicide bombers who blew himself up on July 7, Babar identified Khan from a picture as someone he had seen at a jihadi training camp in Pakistan. Before 9/11, British officials often claimed that one reason they tolerated the presence and the activism of militants such as Bakri and Abu Hamza was because they could tightly monitor what such extremists were doing, thus reaping an intelligence bonanza regarding what major jihadis were up to. U.K. officials still maintain that they had extremists like Bakri under tight surveillance all along, and thus the terrorist cells in July’s London bombing attacks had to have been recruited, trained and armed outside the immediate circle of notorious militants like Bakri or Abu Hamza. However, some U.S. counterterrorism officials question whether British monitoring of Bakri and other notorious agitators was really as thorough as U.K. authorities believed it was. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #3 Deportations out of western countries only shifts the problem. Sudden death resolves the problem. |
| Posted by: Captain America 2005-09-01 16:36 |
| #2 He's become accustomed to British civilization. I suspect the locals will quickly become irritated enough to handle him in their own peculiar way... without the need for outside assistance. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-09-01 13:30 |
| #1 Radical imam Omar Bakri Mohammed, whose pro-Jihad agitation led British authorities last week to ban him from their shores, now is likely to set up a new base in either Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates, according to a close associate. Can any of our operatives possibly set him up to have a "work accident"? |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-09-01 10:50 |