Has Al-Muhajiroun Been Underestimated - BBC News

6/28/2017 Has al-Muhajiroun been underestimated?
- BBC News
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Has al-Muhajiroun been underestimated?

By Richard Watson
BBC Newsnight
4 hours ago UK I5:
One of the London Bridge attackers was a follower of the banned al-Muhajiroun
network. But has the UK been guilty of not taking the lslamist group seriously enough?
The man in a white robe with the microphone at the front of the hall addressed his audience of
al-Muhajiroun supporters. Even with cameras there, he didn't hold back.
When Tony Blair came out, George Bush came out at the same time and he said: Are you
with us or you're with the terrorists? What did we Muslims say?"
He paused for effect.
We're not with you, we're with the... terrorists." The audience finished his sentence for him
and cries of Allahu Akbar [God is great] echoed around the room.
It was April 2004 and I'd been invited to film at an al-Muhajiroun meeting at a community hall
in Bethnal Green in east London. I was following a convert to Islam called Sulayman Keeler -
born Simon Keeler - for a film I was making for Newsnight.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40355491 1/17
6/28/2017 Has al-Muhajiroun been underestimated? - BBC News
The next speaker was no less extreme. Abu Uzair, real name Sajid Sharif, took the
microphone. The engineering graduate from Manchester launched into one of al-Muhajiroun's
favourite topics - the 9/11 attacks on America.
"" I
h
"When the two planes magnificently run through those buildings... people say, hang on a
second, that is barbaric. Why did you have to do that? You know why? Because of
ignorance."
At this point, I put my hand up to interrupt, asking him how it could be justifiable to call the
killing of innocent people in the Twin Towers "magnificent".
Abu Uzair replied: "For us it's retaliation."
I pressed on: "But the killing of innocent civilians can't be right.
Jabbing his finger at me, Abu Uzair answered: "It can't be right according to you. According to
Islam it's right. Do you not kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan?"
"I wouldn't call that magnificent," I ventured.
Abu Uzair replied: "IsIamicaIIy speaking it's magnificent."
And with that exchange, the extreme, aggressive ideology of al-Muhajiroun became clear. It
was a message of defiance, of hate. No compromise.
For them Islam was at war with the West. They knew our camera was rolling but they were
justifying violence. This was a year before the London bombings on 7 July 2005 that claimed
52 lives.
The BBC understands that Abu Uzair has never faced legal action in the UK. He gave this
lecture 13 years ago. The legal picture has changed now.
New laws ban the glorification of terrorism and there've been many more successful
prosecutions over the past decade.
http //www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40355491 2/ 7
After the Manchester Arena bomb attack last month, MI5 let it be known that the scale of the
threat from militant Islamists is huge.
Some 3,000 people in the UK are assessed to have current links to violent lslamist
extremism, with another 20,000 assessed to have had recent links. That makes for a Ionglist
of 23,000 people - the population of a small town.
The fact that al-Muhajiroun was allowed to recruit in towns across the UK for years, largely
unfettered by the state, is part of the picture.
The group was the creation of the extremist preacher Omar Bakri Muhammad. Born in Syria,
he was expelled in 1977 for his anti-Baath Party views and travelled to Lebanon where he
joined lslamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Their aim was to create a single Islamic State - a
caliphate - across the entire Middle East and, eventually, the world.
After a brief stay in Egypt, Bakri Muhammad settled in Mecca in Saudi Arabia. In 1983, he
created a new group there called Jamaat al-Muhajiroun. The name means "the community of
the emigrants".
In 1986, Bakri Muhammad's extreme lslamist views and connections to the banned Hizb ut-
Tahrir led the Saudis to expel him. He fled to the UK where he was given asylum. He
immediately created a UK branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir and began an aggressive recruitment drive
among young British Muslims.
In the UK, Bakri Muhammad's sermons called for the black flag of Islam to be hoisted over
Downing Street and for a global caliphate. The next decade was spent peddling his narrative -
that Muslims were the victims of international conspiracies, that Sharia [Islamic law] must
come to the UK.
But Hizb ut-Tahrir's international leadership grew tired of the man who would become known
as the Tottenham Ayatollah, a reference to his office in north London. His focus on the UK
was seen as a distraction from the wider goal of establishing a caliphate across the Middle
East.
http //www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40355491 3/ 7
He was expelled from the party in 1996. And that prompted him to set up a new group in the
UK - al-Muhajiroun.
In the late 1990s, Bakri Muhammad toured towns and cities with large Muslim populations in a
recruitment drive for his new group. He was largely unchallenged by the British state, which
had been preoccupied by the threat posed by Irish republican groups.
They dismissed Bakri Muhammad as a fool. In the wider community, few realised how divisive
and dangerous his views were.
Over the years, I've spent a lot of time in Crawley, investigating terrorism for the BBC. With its
well-kept houses and leafy streets, this Sussex new town seems an unlikely recruiting ground
forjihad. But some of the UKs most notorious Islamists were born there.
Three of those later convicted of planning to detonate a huge fertiliser bomb in 2004 grew up
in the town. The leader of the plot, Omar Khyam, had strong links with al-Muhajiroun.
Omar Khyam and another of the fertiliser bomb plotters, Jawad Akbar, both attended
Hazelwick secondary school in the town. At one point Bakri Muhammad managed to get
himself invited to talk to sixth formers there.
The headteacher of Hazelwick school at that time was Gordon Parry.
"At the time our involvement with him was simply to promote religious tolerance and
understanding and incIusivity," he says. "I will put my hand up now and say that was an utterly
naive thing to do. But at the time I didn't understand what he represented."
Fast-fon/vard to 2017 and the terror attack at London Bridge had a strong link with al-
Muhajiroun. The attack leader Khuram Butt was a supporter of the network, even appearing in
a Channel 4 documentary last year called The Jihadis Next Door.
Butt didn't exactly hide his extremist sympathies, and this raises a huge question for the
British state - was the threat posed by radicals linked to al-Muhajiroun underestimated for
years?
One senior former government adviser on the threat from terrorism certainly thinks it was.
Richard Kemp was chairman of the Cobra Intelligence Group at the time of the London
bombings in 2005. He was responsible for co-ordinating intelligence from the Security Service
MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Sen/ice Ml6, reporting to the secret Cobra committee that
briefs the government on national security at times of crisis.
"We've been far too tolerant of al-Muhajiroun," says Kemp. Their use of abusive language and
threats was not tackled, he suggests.
lt was a major failure and we've seen the consequences - we've seen Lee Rigby [murdered]
by a follower of al-Muhajiroun, we've seen numerous attacks around the worId."
Kemp, also a former commander of British armed forces in Afghanistan, says there was a
certain amount of complacency about al-Muhajiroun, both in the intelligence community and in
successive governments. "There was a real failure politically and among the police and
intelligence services to understand the way this situation was going to deveIop."
There was a period of inaction on the part of the authorities before 9/11 - but also after - that
was extremely dangerous, Kemp believes.
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GETTY IMAGES
"The networks and the individuals involved in them saw that we were weak. They saw that we
wanted to appease them and we wanted to let them continue and they exploited that - in
terms of developing and building a network.
There was an element of complacency among those people who were monitoring their
activities. I certainly heard words used like 'blowhard' and 'windbag' in relation to some
cases... that we're looking at people who talk a big war but don't actually fight it and don't
pose a big threat to the UK."
Peter Clarke, the former head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, doesn't agree
with this analysis.
"It is easy to say with hindsight that more should have been done sooner to focus on the
lslamist threat. This is too simplistic. The Good Friday agreement may have been signed in
1998, but the dissident republicans of the Real IRA were attacking targets on the mainland
UK, including the BBC, until 2001. At that time lslamist groups were involved in low-level
criminality to raise funds to send back to political organisations in their countries of origin."
Mr Clarke says he never heard the term "blowhard" being used.
I-I--
ln 2004 it was clear the threat had escalated. An intercepted electronic communication about
perfecting the ingredients for a massive fertiliser bomb prompted a huge counter-terrorism
investigation by the police and MI5 - Operation Crevice. This was followed a few months later
by another big investigation, Operation Rhyme, to foil a second lslamist bomb plot in the UK.
There was a race to investigate these plots, Clarke says. "These were both intercepted as a
result of intensive investigation by MI5 and police, and preceded the 7/7 attacks. So it is not
right to say that the lslamist threat was ignored.
Priorities were chosen according to the threat posed by various groups. After 9/11, Irish
terrorist groups pulled back on their activities, allowing a shift in focus towards finding out if
Islamists did indeed pose a threat."
The fertiliser bomb plotters - and the 7/7 London bombers who murdered 52 people the
following year - also had strong links to al-Muhajiroun.
GUZELIAN
By 2004, it was clear that the al-Muhajiroun network had been at the very least a gateway to
terror.
Al-Muhajiroun and its leaders always played a cat and mouse game with the state. Bakri
Muhammad wound up the group in 2004 because he thought it was about to be banned.
But the network then launched a series of groups which were, in effect, different names for the
same thing.
AI-Ghurabaa and the Saviour Sect both emerged in 2005 as splinter groups, and were
proscribed in 2006. Other groups created by the same network included Muslims Against
Crusades, IsIam4UK, Shariah4UK, Call to Submission, Islamic Path, the London School of
Sharia, and Need4KhiIafah. All of them were proscribed by the government after they
emerged.
All of these groups can be considered as the al-Muhajiroun network. They all wanted to see
Sharia law introduced to the UK by force, do not believe in democracy, and have hostile views
about Shia Muslims and other minorities that they claim are consistent with the teachings of
the Koran.
So why was more not done? This was ideological extremism and the leaders of the network,
like Anjem Choudary, were always careful to stay, just, on the right side of the law so they
could not be arrested.
No-one knew whether the ideological stance of al-Muhajiroun was going to inevitably lead to
violence in this country," says Mr Clarke. "Once the threat from dissident republicans receded,
the focus on the lslamist threat grew very quickly. It's also probably fair to say that no-one had
before encountered a terrorist threat that was rooted in ideology rather than political goals,
that knew no boundaries and for whose adherents capture or death was not a risk but an
aspiration."
The British state did take action. Bakri Muhammad was stopped from re-entering the UK after
the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, moving back to Lebanon, where he is serving a prison
sentence for terrorism offences today. But his network continued under different names.
The network's supporters have been linked to terror plots across the world. And a number of
adherents in the UK have been imprisoned. In addition to the five fertiliser bomb plotters -
Omar Khyam, Jawad Akbar, Waheed Mahmood, Anthony Garcia and Salahuddin Amin - other
followers such as Sulayman Keeler and Abu Izzadeen have been convicted of terror-related
offences. Figurehead Anjem Choudary was eventually jailed for five years for inviting support
for so-called Islamic State.
I 2003: Suicide bombing attack on Mike's Place bar in Israel
I 2004: Fertiliser bomb plot and Operation Rhyme in the UK
I 2005: London bombings
I 2013: Murder of Lee Rigby
I 2014: Suicide bombing attack in Iraq by Waheed Majid
I 2017: London Bridge attacks
This latest connection, between the recent London Bridge terrorist attack and al-Muhajiroun,
is likely to feature in the ongoing police investigation.
We know Khuram Butt, the attack leader, was a long-term supporter of the group. But if you
dig a little further some interesting facts emerge about the gym in east London where he used
to train - the Ummah Fitness Centre in Ilford.
Newsnight discovered that a man called Sajeel Shahid applied for planning permission to
create a gym for Muslims from warehouse space in 2011. He is a past leader of al-
Muhajiroun.
To understand the significance of this, we have to look back to the late 1990s when Omar
Bakri Muhammad set up a branch of al-Muhajiroun in Pakistan. Sajeel Shahid is alleged to
have helped run the office in Lahore.
Just after the 9/11 attack, an American jihadist called Mohammed Junaid Babarjoined them.
Three years later, he turned against his old friends and became a jihadi "supergrass",
testifying against people in the al-Muhajiroun network who went on to plan a terror attack in
the UK.
We obtained a confidential transcript of the FBl's interview with Junaid Babar. In it, Junaid
Babar tells the FBI that Sajeel Shahid was the leader of al-Muhajiroun in Pakistan. The
document alleges that Junaid Babar said that Sajeel Shahid co-ordinated training forjihadi
recruits at a camp in Pakistan where they "most likely received explosives training".
Junaid Babar also said in court, during the 2007 trial of the fertiliser bomb plotters, that in
February 2003 he and Sajeel Shahid had found a good location for weapons training in
Pakistan's north-west frontier province near the town of Malakand. The future leader of the
fertiliser bomb plot, Omar Khyam, and the future leader of the London 7/7 bombers,
Mohammad Siddique Khan, trained there.
We tried to contact Sajeel Shahid to ask him about this, but a man answering the phone
number we had simply said it was the wrong number and hung up. There's absolutely no
suggestion that Sajeel Shahid had a hand in the London Bridge attack, and he has never
been charged with any terror-related offence. Sajeel Shahid has previously denied being the
leader of al-Muhajiroun in Pakistan and said that he had only been a student in the country.
The named groups connected with al-Muhajiroun have been proscribed, but the networks of
supporters persist.
After the recent spate of attacks, Prime Minister Theresa May said "enough is enough" and
declared her intent to do something about it.
But based on the last two decades of various governments failing to get on top of the problem
of radicalisation, Richard Kemp remains worried. I'm not sure that there is a political courage
or the political wiII."
Richard Watson's report for Newsnight can be seen on BBC iPlayer
http //www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40355491 12/17

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6/28/2017 Has al-Muhajiroun been underestimated?

EB Home News Sport Weather iPlayer TV Radio

Has al-Muhajiroun been underestimated?

4 hours ago UK I5:

He paused for effect.

Abu Uzair replied: "For us it's retaliation."

I pressed on: "But the killing of innocent civilians can't be right.

"I wouldn't call that magnificent," I ventured.

Abu Uzair replied: "IsIamicaIIy speaking it's magnificent."

The headteacher of Hazelwick school at that time was Gordon Parry.

Mr Clarke says he never heard the term "blowhard" being used.

I 2003: Suicide bombing attack on Mike's Place bar in Israel

I 2004: Fertiliser bomb plot and Operation Rhyme in the UK

I 2005: London bombings

I 2013: Murder of Lee Rigby

I 2014: Suicide bombing attack in Iraq by Waheed Majid

I 2017: London Bridge attacks

Richard Watson's report for Newsnight can be seen on BBC iPlayer

http //www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40355491 12/17

Share this story About sharing

Sturgeon to reset referendum plans

PM calls for tower cladding investigation

Pairjailed for Dark Ages murder

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Was this the most dangerous group in Britain?

How I saved big cats by introducing magic dogs

What happened to Hong Kong predictions?

Britain and EU at odds over citizens rights

Cash machine quiz: Test your knowledge

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