LONDON, 1 August 2005 — An urgent investigation has started into how Osman Hussain, one of the five failed 7/21 bombers managed to leave the country almost five days after the attempted attacks on the London transport system.
The police are keen to find out how he was able to leave despite the CCTV images of the four suspects; why he chose to go to Italy — was it because of his family connections or of another network in Italy; and what lay behind the 7/7 and 7/21 attacks.
Hussain who fled to Rome on the Eurostar train from Waterloo station in London via Paris and Milan, faced no border controls when he left Britain. Following calls from the opposition Conservative Party that the country’s border controls were in shambles and that the government needed to get a grip on these controls, the Leader of the House (of Commons) Geoff Hoon stressed that the government is considering reinstating such controls. Hussain, whose lawyer is fighting his extradition to the UK, may be detained in Italy for some time. Scotland Yard officers are due to present the extradition papers to Italian Justice Ministry officials today. Italian police also confirmed that they arrested a second brother of Osman Hussain in Brescia on charges he had allegedly hid or destroyed documents pertinent to the 7/21 investigation.
Zambia said it is preparing to hand over to Britain a Briton of Indian origin arrested there 11 days ago and who reportedly was the mastermind of the London bombings. “We have tentatively agreed to hand him over to the British government,” Agence France Presse quoted an official as saying in Lusaka.
“The US government also requested us to hand him over to them, but after further discussions among ourselves, we realized that it would be proper that he be handed over to the British government because he is a British national,” he said.
In the UK, the investigation into the attacks resulted in new raids in Brighton in Sussex yesterday, in which six men and two women were arrested. This brings to 19 the number of people in custody in relation to the 7/21 investigation.
Hoon, the former defense secretary, warned the public to remain vigilant and that the terrorist threat remained “real and dangerous and is far from over.” He stressed that there was no specific threat, but intelligence reports suggest that a third terrorist cell may be on the loose planning attacks on soft targets in a third wave of bombings. This is what triggered off last Thursday’s “extreme state of threat” security exercise in London.
Indeed, the British Transport Police yesterday announced that they will be targeting specific ethnic groups for “stop and search” on the London transport system. This policy of racial profiling or stereotyping is not new, and was used by Sir Paul Congdon, the then Metropolitan Police commissioner, in 1983 to target young Afro-Caribbean men for “stop and search”, who he suggested were most likely to be muggers or drug dealers.
Home Office Minister Hazel Blears stressed that “the police powers will be used on the basis of intelligence and the nature of the threat. The stop and search policy will apply to young Muslims with rucksacks. What is important is that we have a dialogue and try to explain why this is being done. There is a huge support for what the police are doing. They and the rest of the emergency services have done a fantastic job. They have been brilliant. As Sir Ian Blair said the other day, the way we can defeat this threat of terrorism is by working with the Muslim communities. We have to be more vigilant.”
Human Rights groups such as Liberty have warned that racial profiling is a dangerous policy which could lead to disaster. Londoners are divided on the stop and search policy. Many are wary of traveling on the tube and bus. “I would be more suspicious of a rucksack than the color of a person’s skin. In any case an extremist can be black, Asian, white or any color,” said one commuter.
Asian Muslim commuters talk about suspicious looks they get especially if they carry a bag. They warn that not all the stop and search is intelligence led as Minister Blears suggested. They blame the media coverage of the attacks which they stress has built up a stereotype of the potential Muslim bomber.
The government in fact announced yesterday that it is also embarking on an engagement offensive with Muslim leaders and youth over the next few months.
