It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Before his detention, Qatada received a range of taxpayer benefits totalling about £50,000 a year. Apart from incapacity benefit for his bad back, there was a further £800 a week in child benefits, housing and council tax credits, and income support. That’s £500,000 over a decade – plus the lawyers’ fees that, of course, have been funded by the state.
The family lived in an £800,000 four-bedroom semi in Acton, west London, before moving to Wembley during Qatada’s most recent enforced absence. The fact that on his initial arrest in February 2001 he had £170,000 in cash, including an envelope containing £805 destined “For the Mujahideen in Chechnya”, seems to have had no bearing on these handouts. In fact, incarceration has brought the occasional bonus, such as the £2,500 Qatada scooped when the European Court of Human Rights ruled a period of detention in Belmarsh unlawful and unfroze his assets.
Indeed, a 2009 online list of required reading for terrorists – called A Mujahid’s Bookbag – includes 81 lengthy works and 98 articles by Abu Qatada. Nineteen of his audio-cassette sermons were found by German police in the Hamburg apartment of Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker.
All this global incitement took place in London, under the noses of the British security services. And, while here, Qatada has never exactly concealed his true feelings for his new home: in one sermon in the Finsbury Park mosque in 1999, he said that Americans should be attacked, and that they and the British people were no different from Jews, whom he had already said should all be killed. Only after 9/11 and the 2005 bombs in London was Qatada deemed “very dangerous”.
The Appellant has long-established connections with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qa’eda. He was in close contact with Khaled Al Fawwaz, Bin Laden’s representative in the UK prior to his arrest in the UK in 1998, who is now in detention pending extradition to the US for his alleged involvement in the East African bombings in 1998. In 1998 it was reported that the Appellant had in the past received funding directly from Bin Laden.
The GIA was a major terrorist organisation in Algeria in the 1990s, and also outside Algeria, notably in France. The background to the splintering off of the GSPC is set out in the SIAC Part 4 ATCSA generic judgment. The Appellant was a spiritual adviser to the GIA until 1996.
He became a spiritual leader for the GSPC, as well as an adviser to Moroccan, Tunisian and Libyan extremist groups. His influence and standing in London grew.
In February 2001, the Appellant was arrested and his addresses were searched in connection with an investigation by the Metropolitan Police into UK links to the Abu Doha Frankfurt cell. These searches and
interviews of the Appellant failed to produce sufficient admissible evidence against him to sustain a prosecution, and so charges were not brought against him. However, during the searches of his addresses, UK and foreign currency with a total value of £170,000 was found. £805 was found attached to a note indicating that it was bound for the mujahedin in Chechnya.
Originally posted by OtherSideOfTheCoin
A perfect example of how the British benefits system doesn’t always work out the way it should. It awful that terrorist is awarded benefits paid by those who he seeks to harm form a state he seeks to destroy.
I personally support the idea of benefits and the welfare state, but I think it needs a drastic overall to prevent people taking advantage like this. Half a million to a terrorist is idiotic, it’s like the UK is funding terrorists though the back door.
As much as I hate to say it, this wouldn’t happen in America.
Originally posted by Rubinstein
He's not a terrorist, suicide bombers aren't real, it's just an excuse for when the secret services planted a bomb somewhere. The War on Terror is a Fraud
Originally posted by OtherSideOfTheCoin
reply to post by Wonderer2012
You know if you bothered to read into the history of Islamic extremism you would probably find some things that are every bit as interesting as your beloved conspiracies. Take what you said about Abu Qatada operating in London and how you “think” he was MI5 being used to recruit terrorists. You’re not actually that far off although the truth is less spectacular.
Before 9/11 the British security services provided shelter to a number of radical Islamises, there was a unspoken agreement between the British and the “terrorists”, “don’t attack us we will turn a blind eye”. This eventually led to Brittan being referred to as “Londonstan” but French Intelligence. During the capture of the BBC journalist Alan Johnston in 2007 the British government went to Qatada for assistance despite him being in prison at the time.