Hooked at last

SATURDAY morning and Abu Hamza Masri, finally deprived of his liberty and his trademark hook, was emerging from his second fitful night in Belmarsh high-security jail.

As the first spots of rain fell out of a grey sky, most shopkeepers and early shoppers were unwilling to talk about a man who brought such infamy to their area. On the front gate of the mosque, from where his bodyguards used to glower at unwelcome visitors, the rusting padlocks sway gently on their chains in the breeze. The dawn raid on Abu Hamza’s home in Hammersmith, the dizzying pace of a process that took him to Paddington Police Station, to Belmarsh and Bow Street magistrates’ court and cleared the way for his extradition to the United States, confirmed beyond doubt what many Muslims in the area had already hoped: that his reign of terror over a place of sanctuary in a corner of the capital is over.

The relief is not universal. On the street outside, Muhammad, born and raised in the shadow of the Arsenal football ground nearby, and wearing a jersey proclaiming the English champions, pointedly pronounces himself "Egyptian" when asked where he is from. "My family is from Egypt. Today, I feel more Egyptian, not English," he said. "They have taken the sheikh for saying what he believes and what many others believe is true. But the worst thing they could do is give him to the Americans on a plate, and that will happen."

Muhammad, 17, stood amid the practical evidence of the enduring support for Hamza, who was himself born in Egypt; the hastily-prepared flyers and placards decrying his arrest, the debris of the previous day’s outburst against the latest twist in his story. A hardcore of Hamza’s supporters met outside the mosque on Friday afternoon to hear a rallying cry worthy of the controversial cleric himself, before marching on the US embassy.

"The shameful and heavy-handed arrest of Sheikh Abu Hamza has proven unequivocally that any Muslim who speaks out against idolatry, corruption, oppression, Zionism and Christian fanaticism is subject to arrest," a spokesman for Hamza told the throng dodging traffic on the busy road outside the mosque.

But the disquiet is not confined to the more extreme elements of Hamza’s community. While community leaders and their followers attempt a dispassionate position in public, it is not difficult to penetrate the surface. Beneath lies a keen sense of injustice, frustration and some degree of anger, even among the moderate majority of worshippers, over the authorities’ treatment of the running sore represented by a former nightclub bouncer who became one of Britain’s most notorious hate figures. "The Muslim community is the victim of his criminal activities," said Mufti Abdulqadir Barkatullah, a trustee of the Finsbury Park mosque when Hamza’s "take-over" enforced the closure of the building in January last year. "We at the mosque have all suffered from him and his thugs. The Muslim community would have preferred him to be charged under British law because he is a British person. But the anger isn’t that he’s been arrested, the anger is about why he was let loose to cause harm to the Muslim community in the first place."

Abu Hamza was no friend of the Muslim community, and his alleged acts of intimidation and violence against them are deplored alongside the inflammatory statements that outraged the rest of the country. But, senior British Muslims point out, his misbehaviour had been continuing and consistently reported to authorities, long before he exploded into the notice of the general public, without provoking any determined action to deal with him.

It is an issue that is being pondered well beyond this corner of north London: aside from the questions about the provenance of the case against him, why has he finally been propelled into such an apparently conclusive process now?

"The suspicion must be that our government didn’t really have much to go on and this is a get-out for them," said Inayat Bungawala, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Great Britain (MCGB). He is hugely sceptical of the clandestine manoeuvres that have pushed Hamza to this point. "That would be dangerous," he told Scotland on Sunday, "no matter what Abu Hamza stands for. It will be a problem if the feeling is left in the Muslim community that people can be hounded out of the country for just holding opinions different from what the majority of the public believes."

It was early on Wednesday that Trevor Kavanagh, the political editor of the Sun, received a call informing him that the most notorious man in Britain was to suffer the indignity of a dawn raid on his home and, ultimately, expulsion from the UK for good. Kavanagh, a man with a network of contacts deep inside the government, predictably refuses to name the source of the tip-off.

Significantly, police sources confirmed that their operation only became a "dawn raid" after details leaked out: they had to bring forward the raid after being alerted to the Sun’s plans to put ‘Hook Seized Today’ on its front page on Thursday morning.

The atmosphere at the Home Office early last week was feverish as it became clear they were reaching the conclusion of their campaign to free themselves of the excitable cleric. The US deposition politely requesting the handover did not come out of the blue. Home Secretary David Blunkett had spoken to US Attorney-General John Ashcroft several times on Monday and Tuesday to fine-tune the details of the transatlantic operation. In the excitement of the run-up to their big event, the initial judgment of Blunkett and his advisers was that he should not go on television to talk about it once Hamza was locked up because "he would not have been able to keep the grin off his face".

Neither was the conclusive move against Hamza an instinctive response to any further deterioration in his behaviour in recent weeks: the Home Office concedes that, in fact, he had been "relatively quiet". The dramatic events of the past few days were the culmination of months of diplomatic activity involving scores of civil servants and senior politicians including Blunkett, Ashcroft and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Home Office sources acknowledge January this year as the point at which New Labour - and Blunkett in particular - "applied the booster rockets" to their campaign to expel Hamza. Officials recall how the Home Secretary thumped his mahogany desk in fury after Hamza passed the latest stage in his effort to retain his British citizenship via an appearance before the Immigration Appeals Commission. A deportation process which Blunkett finally admitted last week had been altered specifically to speed Hamza’s route out of Britain was already running into the sand.

A former Home Office minister recalled the official frustration. "I would go to meetings where Hamza was almost the only thing discussed," he told Scotland on Sunday. "Sometimes he wasn’t even on the agenda. He was an irritant, but it would be nave to say that is the only reason he was chased up. If you look at his statements alone, some of them are calculated to cause hostility. But we all know it wasn’t just about his statements. There is clear evidence that suggests he has been involved with people involved in international terrorism."

Not clear enough, however, to warrant a case against him to be brought before the UK courts. Scotland on Sunday understands that, in a meeting earlier this year with representatives of Britain’s Muslim community, Blunkett indicated that action would be taken to "sort out" Hamza. The government did continue its own efforts to remove him, and to harden the charges against him. Its lawyers told the Special Immigration Appeals Commission last month that Hamza had "supported individuals in the physical aspects of jihad, including fighting overseas". Hamza had "provided through Finsbury Park a centre of extremism and a safe haven for Islamic extremists, enabling them to develop the support and contacts necessary to further violent aims", according to Blunkett’s QC, Ian Burnett.

But it is now clear that any growing confidence exhibited by Blunkett earlier this year was more to do with his faith in the Americans’ ability to nail their man and the controversial "fast-track" deportation procedures thrashed out between the two allies last year. The Americans have been building a case against Hamza for several months. Crucial to their efforts was the achievement in February of gaining the co-operation of a key witness, James Ujaama, an American who became a Hamza confidant in the 1990s when he attended the Finsbury Park mosque. Under a plea agreement, Ujaama admitted to illegally conspiring to provide goods to the former Taliban administration in Afghanistan. He admitted that he and a co-conspirator were sent by Hamza to Afghanistan in 2000 for jihad training, and that he delivered currency "to persons in the territory of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban".

In September 2001, according to the agreement, Ujaama ferried money at the direction of a co-conspirator from London to Pakistan "with the intent of delivering it to persons in Afghanistan". Prosecutors had also alleged that in 1999 Ujaama and Hamza worked together to try to establish a terror training camp in Bly, Oregon. Ujaama faxed Hamza a document that compared property there to the terrain in Afghanistan and said it could be used as a place to hide weapons.

The central charges in the indictment accuse Hamza of giving support and directions to a militant group called the Islamic Army of Aden in December 1998 when it kidnapped 16 Western tourists, including 12 Britons and two Americans, in Yemen. According to the indictment, Hamza provided a satellite phone to the group and received three calls in London the day before the hostages were taken.

It is believed that the American investigation was aided considerably by hundreds of pages of information relating to the allegations handed over by British police over the last three months.

But the apparent success in speeding the way towards a prosecution has not been universally welcomed by Hamza’s most ferocious opponents. A Times editorial on the day after the arrest complained that the development "begs serious questions about why Britain has been so dilatory in prosecuting Abu Hamza when it was in possession of some of the same information five years ago". It was a familiar refrain.

Home Office insiders protest that the main reason for the UK’s inability to prosecute Hamza for the same 11 charges was the fact that phone-tap evidence cannot be used in a British court. US evidence allegedly linking Hamza to the Yemeni kidnapping would not have been admissible in British courts because it was obtained from intercepting satellite calls. In the case of Abu Hamza, the anomaly is no longer relevant, as the government has managed to find a ‘Plan B’ to get round the problem. "At least he is behind bars," one ministerial source said last night, "where we can keep an eye on him."

Despite the success in caging a man seen as an enemy by the Muslim community itself, Mufti Barkatullah claims the suspicions of many Muslims about the motives of the government throughout the saga of Abu Hamza will remain.

"Community leaders think that he’s been used like tissue paper and thrown away by the authorities," he said. "While he was allowed to commit particular offences at the same time other imams were put away for years. This particular criminal person was used by the authorities for their own purposes."