by Summary:
From collusion to blowback Dr Nafeez Ahmed is a serious scholar and not a conspiracy theorist. He once worked for the UK Guardian but he started getting too close to the truth for them. He still sometimes writes for The Independent. KV Except - The terrorists who rampaged across London on the night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The same network was heavily involved in recruiting Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Police have confirmed that Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba were the three terrorists shot dead after participating in a brutal van and knife attack in the London Bridge area. MI5 and ISIS recruiters, sitting in a tree The official explanation of the failure
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From collusion to blowback Dr Nafeez Ahmed is a serious scholar and not a conspiracy theorist. He once worked for the UK Guardian but he started getting too close to the truth for them. He still sometimes writes for The Independent. KV Except - The terrorists who rampaged across London on the night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The same network was heavily involved in recruiting Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Police have confirmed that Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba were the three terrorists shot dead after participating in a brutal van and knife attack in the London Bridge area. MI5 and ISIS recruiters, sitting in a tree The official explanation of the failure
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From collusion to blowback
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is a serious scholar and not a conspiracy theorist. He once worked for the UK Guardian but he started getting too close to the truth for them. He still sometimes writes for The Independent. KV
Except -
The terrorists who rampaged across London on the night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The same network was heavily involved in recruiting Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya.
Police have confirmed that Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba were the three terrorists shot dead after participating in a brutal van and knife attack in the London Bridge area.
MI5 and ISIS recruiters, sitting in a tree
The official explanation of the failure to prosecute Bakri and Choudary for so long despite this track record is that the two were notoriously clever at appearing to staying on the right side of law. Supposedly, this meant that counter-terrorism officials found it difficult to build a case against them.
This narrative is problematic. Security sources speaking outside of official press statements have pointed to a somewhat different reality: that both Bakri and Choudary had ties to MI5.
In his book The Way of the World, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Ron Suskind recounts how he was told by a senior MI5 officer that Bakri had long been an informant for the security service, who “had helped MI5 on several of its investigations.”
Bakri confirmed the same in an interview with Suskind. “Bakri enjoyed his notoriety and was willing to pay for it with information he passed to the police,” wrote Suskind.
“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’s ties with British intelligence to support foreign operations, moreover, go back decades.
As I wrote in the Independent on Sunday:
“According to a former US Army intelligence officer, John Loftus, three senior al-Muhajiroun figures — Mr Bakri Mohammed, Abu Hamza and Haroon Rashid Aswat — were recruited by MI6 in 1996 to influence Islamist activities in the Balkans.”
But the connection did not stop there.
In 2000, Bakri admitted training British Muslims to fight as jihadists abroad, boasting: “The British government knows who we are. MI5 has interrogated us many times. I think now we have something called public immunity.”
A year later, the private security firm set up by Bakri in cohorts with Abu Hamza — Sakina Security Services — was raided by police and eventually shut down. Speaking in Parliament at the time, Andrew Dismore MP claimed the firm sent Britons “overseas for jihad training with live arms and ammunition”. Bakri was not arrested, let alone charged or prosecuted.
In short, Omar Bakri’s utility to British state operations in foreign theatres, such as the Balkans, appeared to grant him immunity in extremist recruitment at home.
To this day, it is not widely known that Bakri and his al-Muhajiroun network played a key role in facilitating the recruitment, radicalisation and logistics behind the 7/7 London bombings. The ultimate suppression of crucial evidence of this from government narratives, despite being mandatory reading for all legal counsel during the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest, has granted the group virtual free reign.
Thus, Omar Bakri’s acolyte and deputy, Anjem Choudary, led a similarly charmed life.
Days after Choudary’s terrorism conviction, a former Scotland Yard counter-terrorism officer who had investigated Choudary revealed that prior to the proceedings, Choudary too had been protected by MI5.
The Telegraph reported that despite being at “the forefront of radical Islam in Britain” for 20 years:
“The security services repeatedly prevented Scotland Yard from pursuing criminal investigations against hate preacher Anjem Choudary… Met counter-terror officers often felt they had enough evidence to build a case against the radicalising cleric, only to be told to hang fire by MI5, because he was crucial to one of their on-going investigations.”
It was only in August 2015, after Choudary posted YouTube videos online which openly documented his support for ISIS, that he was eventually prosecuted. Prior to that, the police believed they had a watertight case, but the decision not to prosecute had come from MI5.
The police source himself told the newspaper:
“I am gobsmacked that we allowed him to carry on as long as long as he did. He was up to his neck in it but the police can’t do full investigations on people if the security service say they are working on a really big job, because they have the priority. That is what they did constantly. While the police might have had lots of evidence they were pulled back by the security service because he [Choudary] was one of the people they were monitoring. It was very frustrating and did cause some tension but we were told we had to consider the bigger picture.”
The bigger picture: war
According to Charles Shoebridge, though — a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer — “nothing was done by UK authorities” to stop UK citizens “joining jihadist groups in Libya and Syria.”
This was despite the fact that these Britons “made no secret on social media of the fact, even sometimes posting evidence of their participation in acts of terrorism and war crimes.” There was an “obvious risk of terrorism blowback were such trained and experienced extremists to return to Britain.”