|
Aswat suspected of alqaeda links { August 4 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1541958,00.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1541958,00.html
MI5 to question Briton wanted in US
Aswat suspected of links to al-Qaida
Richard Norton-Taylor and Andrew Meldrum in Pretoria
Thursday August 4, 2005
The Guardian
MI5 is to question a Briton being deported from Zambia about what he knows of the al-Qaida networks and extreme Islamist groups here.
Haroon Rashid Aswat will be flown to Britain, despite the fact that he faces charges in the US - where he is wanted for allegedly planning to set up a jihad training camp.
The Zambian president, Levy Mwanawasa, said yesterday that Mr Aswat had been arrested for allegedly violating the immigration laws of Zambia. He added: "Once we were holding him we realised he was an alleged terrorist. It was agreed between the American and British governments that he should be deported to the United Kingdom."
Mr Aswat was visited yesterday by British consular officials. The Foreign Office has been in touch with his estranged family in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, the home of Mohammed Sidique Khan, one of the July 7 London suicide bombers.
But senior counter-terrorist officials insist there is no evidence that he was the "mastermind" behind the July 7 bombings. There is also no evidence, the officials add, that Mr Aswat was aware of the July 7 bombings or of the failed attacks of July 21.
British security and intelligence agencies want to question Mr Aswat about whether he had known the four suicide bombers or the four men arrested under suspicion of involvement in the July 21 attempts. "Aswat is of interest in his own right," an official said.
British officials were concerned that Mr Aswat would be deported to the US and become a "ghost detainee", preventing them from questioning him, or even knowing his whereabouts.
Mr Aswat faces charges in the US over an alleged plan by Abu Hamza to set up a training camp in Bly, Oregon, in 1999. Abu Hamza, the former imam at Finsbury Park mosque in north London is now in a British jail facing 16 charges, including incitement to murder and stirring up racial hatred.
Mr Aswat was arrested in Zambia after the July 7 attacks but had been living in South Africa for more than two years. People who worked with him described him as a quiet man who did not broadcast extremist views. But others said he had boasted that he had served as the bodyguard to Osama bin Laden.
South African intelligence sources say Mr Aswat was in contact with a number of South Africans considered to be extremists. South African intelligence is investigating the possibility that al-Qaida cells are operating there and that al-Qaida training camps are being established in the Guateng province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, and Eastern Cape province, according to Johannesburg's Talk Radio 702 eyewitness news.
|
|
