Hidden Threat

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By Thursday night, the police had finished their search and withdrawn, handing over the keys to the mosque trustees. But Friday morning, the mosque was still shut — this time it was the trustees who had padlocked the building, and even had its lower windows barricaded in corrugated aluminum. The mosque's firebrand cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri, who lost one eye and most of two arms to a landmine in Afghanistan, was instead forced to hold Friday prayers in the street for some 150 worshipers, a service given protection by the police. The trustees have clashed for years with Abu Hamza, who effectively took control of the mosque after he arrived there in late 1996 (see box).

Abu Hamza was briefly arrested in 1999 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, but British police have made no effort to silence him. In the U.S., he is accused of having ties with the Islamic Army of Aden, which claimed responsibility for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and of links with James Ujaama, an American awaiting trial for allegedly attempting to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon. Ujaama reportedly ran a website in London for Abu Hamza. The Yemenis also want to question Abu Hamza about his alleged involvement in a plot in Yemen, where his son and stepson were both arrested on terrorist charges. And Abu Hamza has also annoyed Britain's Charity Commission by refusing to stop preaching, despite a ban they placed on him last spring. Last week, however, the Commission said he had met a new deadline for making his case and that it would be reviewed over the next weeks.

The Finsbury Park mosque has long been rumored to be a center for jihad recruitment under the aegis of Abu Hamza. Many prominent terrorist suspects spent time there, though Abu Hamza says he did not know any of them personally. Abu Hamza's anti-Western rhetoric and militancy has earned him a sinister reputation, but his supporters say he has done a great deal for the community by encouraging young men to take up religion rather than drugs and alcohol. Since Sept. 11, the mosque has been under constant surveillance, not only by British security services but also by the intelligence agencies of Muslim nations, whose governments Abu Hamza regularly denounces.

Indeed, many moderate Muslims have drifted away from the North London Central Mosque, put off by Abu Hamza's jihad rhetoric and the shifting crowd of itinerant young Muslim men, many of them Algerian, to whom he offers shelter and anonymity. Still, the raid did leave bruised feelings in the Muslim community, despite police insistence they avoided searching the prayer hall and covered their shoes before entering the building. Omar Bakri, the founder of the extremist Al-Muhajiroun movement and a visiting preacher at Finsbury Park, calls the raid a way "to silence the Muslims before bombing Iraq." But Algerian Refugee Council founder Mohammed Sekkoum, who claims Abu Hamza is tarnishing the image of Muslims, was also unhappy. "The raid was very aggressive, a mosque is after all no different from a church or a synagogue," he says.

The fact that the last few weeks' raids and arrests have all involved North Africans, many of them Algerians and many of them asylum seekers, could have a worrying backlash. Sekkoum warns there are up to 100 Algerian asylum seekers in Britain said by the community to have committed terrorist acts in Algeria. Already there are voices in Britain demanding a more rigorous system for removing failed asylum applicants. "We Algerians are killed in our own country and now we are seen as dangerous here," says Abu Maria, an Algerian who was at Abu Hamza's prayers last Friday. "We can't go anywhere."

In Italy, too, tension is high after restrictive anti-illegal immigration laws came into effect last year that make it obligatory for police to detain anyone without proper papers. The crackdown limits the possibility for immigrants to begin building a life for themselves, and "forces some into illicit activity, like producing false documents, that offers support to terrorist organizations," says a Bologna prosecutor involved in terrorism investigations. "Immigration doesn't mean terrorism. Of course, the terrorist can take advantage of this movement and hide himself within the thousands of upstanding immigrants." Separating legitimate immigrants from would-be terrorists is the next challenge for Europe's intelligence agencies.

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