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Abu Hamza

Mr. Cook, it is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship yet again, although for the first time in Westminster Hall. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) on securing a slot for an Adjournment debate. He was concerned about the many misreportings in the press of the case of Abu Hamza. I fear that people reading the transcript of this debate so far, to the extent that they understand it, will also read a number of misreportings. I shall do my best to put the record straight once again, although I have done so a number of times. I have answered the questions that the hon. Gentleman has put to me, and the same questions when they have been put to me by the hon. Members for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) and for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers). In fact, a few weeks ago I had a meeting with those hon. Members and the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham. He put some of those points to me; I answered them at the time and he put the answers on his website. But he asks me the same questions again and again in a way that fundamentally misunderstands both the law and the facts of the case. I shall try to set the record straight. People listening today or reading this debate probably will have missed some crucial facts. First, Abu Hamza’s assets were, in fact, frozen in April 2002, and he is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence in Belmarsh following his conviction in February last year on six charges of incitement to murder, two charges of stirring up racial hatred and one charge under section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 for possessing information"““likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism””." He lost his appeal against the conviction and is now seeking to appeal in the House of Lords. Those wider issues and the many issues that the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham raised about the history of benefit fraud are not really matters for me as a Treasury Minister. They have been widely discussed in the public domain. As I understand it, the case in 2003 of benefit fraud was closed on the advice of the police. Until now, it was not on the agenda in relation to today’s debate. I would like to set out the facts for the hon. Gentleman and the House. Before I discuss details, I would like to make two general points. First, counter-terrorist financing is an important part of my work at the Treasury. We take our responsibility for asset freezing very seriously. As hon. Members will be aware, this morning eight arrests were made in Birmingham under the 2000 Act. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said that that action serves as a reminder of the real and serious nature of the threat that we face. We have acted and legislated decisively and repeatedly in recent years to tighten and toughen the regime for freezing assets and tackling terrorism financing. In the past few months alone, we have passed new orders to deal with al-Qaeda and the Taliban and terrorism. They allow the use for the first time of classified intelligence material in asset-freezing cases and restrict the payment of state benefits to listed terrorism suspects.