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Abu Hamza

I start by welcoming you to the Chair, Mr. Cook. Half an hour is too short a time in which to give a detailed examination of the issue in every respect, so I shall try to highlight only a few aspects. My central thesis is that none of the lessons of Abu Hamza’s stay have been learnt. In fact, the entire saga could happen all over again. He, his wife and his family would likely be granted British citizenship, housed by a local authority, assessed as being entitled to thousands of pounds in benefits from the general taxpayer and entitled to buy their home from the local authority. Furthermore, Abu Hamza would likely neither be brought before a British court for terror offences—unless the Government relented and allowed intercept evidence to be used in court—nor, crucially, be prevented by the Chancellor’s supposedly tough anti-terror measures from transferring assets worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds from a terrorist suspect family member to another family member who had actually been convicted of terrorist offences. The nightmare that has been Abu Hamza’s stay in Britain could happen all over again. In fact, it could happen sooner than we think, because Abu Hamza could be released from prison as early as next year. I should declare what my interest in the matter has been. I have followed the history of Abu Hamza’s stay in Britain closely since 1999, when, as leader of the Conservative opposition on Labour-controlled Hammersmith and Fulham council, I first became aware of Hamza’s status as a Hammersmith and Fulham council tenant, living in a highly desirable street property on Adie road in the heart of the leafy Brackenbury village in Hammersmith. I called for the council to investigate Hamza’s financial affairs in 2001, and further called for him to be stripped of citizenship and expelled from Britain. I undertook a great deal of research on the purchase and sale of the Adie road property in Hammersmith and called for resignations on the council when it transpired that Abu Hamza and his family had been housed not just once but twice by the then Labour council. Locally, I called on the council to investigate Hamza’s benefits and his tenancy. In 2003, I called on the Government to investigate his financial affairs in detail. In this debate, I shall set out to correct some of the many instances of misreporting in the press on the Hamza affair and bring some new information into the public domain. Abu Hamza was a man at the heart of international terrorism. He influenced both the 7/7 and the 21/7 bombers. Two of the 7/7 bombers spent at least two periods living in the Finsbury Park mosque, while a third attended to hear Abu Hamza’s speeches. According to his family in France, the so-called 20th 9/11 bomber, Zacarias Moussaoui, was changed by the Finsbury Park mosque experience from a happy, outgoing young man into a hard-line radical. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was also there, as was the police killer and ricin poison plotter, Kamel Bourgass. The Government failed to act on much, if any, of that, and decided to act only after US authorities made a move for Hamza, seeking his extradition. As it would have been difficult to extradite him to the US for offences for which he might have faced the death penalty, the British authorities took the easier choice of finally putting him on trial here for stirring up racial hatred, various public order offences and one terrorism offence. Hamza’s views were heinous. There has been much material in the public domain, which I shall not repeat, but I shall repeat material that I downloaded from his website—the website of the Supporters of Sharia—before 9/11. The website was taken down a few days after 9/11, but I shall read a few of its statements that were allowed to go unchallenged by our authorities:"““The Jews have landed to spread corruption. When they come into a land, you will find that corruption begins slowly, then escalates until they are handed over power with others out in front. This is the ways of the Jews, and it has not changed since Rome at the plot to kill Isa””." Just before 9/11, the Supporters of Sharia published a book entitled ““Jihad in America””, which said:"““Many have been asking why doesn’t jihad take place in America. I have been asking myself that question ever since I watched the bombing of Iraq, the Sudan and Afghanistan.””" The first failure by those in authority that I wish to examine concerns Abu Hamza’s right-to-buy purchase of his flat on Adie road, Hammersmith. It was the kind of property that many of the homeless people and those in poor accommodation in my constituency can only dream of—a street property in the heart of the leafy Brackenbury village, home to various media personalities and celebrities. Despite the fact that Hamza was on a wide array of benefits, the Labour council accepted his story that the funds to purchase the flat had come from donations via the mosque. It seems incredible now that the presence of those substantial donations, totalling £75,000, did not trigger the stopping of his benefits. Just as incredible is the fact that the Charity Commission was at the time investigating the finances of the Finsbury Park mosque—or the North Central London Mosque Trust, to give it its official title—where Hamza had been preaching since 1996 or 1997. Indeed, during the long period between the right-to-buy application being submitted in 1998 and the final purchase on 22 May 2000, Hamza and the Finsbury Park mosque were the subject of a number of Charity Commission investigations. According to the commission, five years of accounts were not submitted by the trustees. To use its own words,"““investigating officers concluded that the internal financial and management controls as exercised by the trustees were inadequate.””" Some years later, in 2002, an order was made by the commission to suspend a Barclays bank account after it emerged that Hamza was a signatory to the account and after the trustees confirmed that they had not been aware of the existence of the account. The information on the case is not yet complete, but there should be an urgent investigation of whether the £75,000 purchase price for the Adie road property came from diverted funds from the charitable mosque. That investigation should of course have been carried out thoroughly at the time. It seems extraordinary that a man on benefits could pitch up with £75,000, explain it as donations to fund the purchase of a house and not have his benefits stopped, nor have questions asked about the origin of such a large sum of money. It is also worth remembering that Hamza bought the flat for £75,000 and that his son sold it four years later for £228,000. The second issue that needs urgent investigation is how the Labour council, having sold Hamza the flat on Adie road, managed to house him again, this time in an even bigger and better property—a five-bedroom house on Aldbourne road, Shepherd’s Bush. To give an idea of the desirability of the road, it is home to a Cabinet Minister and another member of the Government. Five-bedroom houses for social rent are in incredibly short supply in Hammersmith and Fulham, and one can imagine how that must appear now.