NOVANEWS
“Special Branch agent and MI5 informantReda Hassaine gave his handlers “scores of documents” linked to Hamza, containing “communications from GIA [al-Qaeda affiliated Armed Islamic Group] activists in Algeria” and “cells planning terrorist attacks in Britain.” Yet none of the preceding evidence ever made it to court. No wonder Hassaine concludes that “terrorist recruitment and fundraising by Islamic militants” under Hamza’s tutelage “were ignored for years by the British security services.”
But he wasn’t just ignored. During this period of terrorist training extensively monitored by MI5 informants, as journalists Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory document in their seminal book, The Suicide Factory (p. 229), Hamza was courted by the security services:
“Special Branch, the intelligence-gathering arm of Scotland Yard, had been talking to Abu Hamza since early 1997, when he was still preaching in Luton. In the classified records of the meetings he is referred to by the codename ‘damson berry’. Unknown to the police, MI5 had also begun meeting Abu Hamza at the behest of French intelligence; he was given the MI5 code number 910… Confidential memos of meetings between the imam of Finsbury Park and his MI5 and Special Branch contacts reveal a respectful, polite and often cooperative relationship. There were at least seven meetings between Abu Hamza and MI5 officers between 1997 and 2000.”
“…This is not a problem that has disappeared. Across the Middle East, US and British security agencies continue to facilitate the activities of al-Qaeda affiliated extremist groups as part of a regional covert anti-Iran offensive – a policy rooted in several decades of manipulating Islamist terrorist networks for geopolitical and geoeconomic purposes….”
