Posted on 02/25/2003 12:58:56 AM PST by Stultis
February 25, 2003
Bloodcurdling brand of hatred taken on tour of Britain
By Sam Lister
POLICE stumbled upon Abdullah el-Faisal’s project to spread racial hatred around Britain by accident after apprehending a suspected rapist in Dorset.
When officers arrested the man in a West Country lay-by in December 2001, a routine search of his car uncovered two tapes, labelled Jihad and Rules of Jihad.
After listening to the tapes, in which el-Faisal was heard urging audiences to kill Western unbelievers, anti-terrorism detectives began investigating the cleric in connection with British links to al-Qaeda terrorists. Two months later, The Times disclosed the true extent of el-Faisal’s bloodcurdling missives, prompting MPs to raise his case in the House of Commons. On February 18 last year he was arrested in a dawn raid at his home in Stratford, East London.
El-Faisal had travelled around Britain since 1998 giving 90-minute addresses to audiences in Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, Maidenhead, Bournemouth, London and venues in Scotland and Wales. Recordings of the talks, attended by up to 500 people a time, revealed his exhortations to take up arms against Jews, Hindus, Americans and other “infidels”.
El-Faisal also kept the company of several alleged al- Qaeda members, including James Ujaama, a Muslim convert currently awaiting trial in America for organising a terrorism training camp, and another man accused of being al- Qaeda’s chief recruiter.
A soft-voiced and engaging speaker, el-Faisal, a Jamaican citizen, quickly gathered a following of mostly young and impressionable Muslim men on coming to Britain from Saudi Arabia in 1992. He acquired rights of residence after marrying a British biology graduate, Zubeida Khan, whom he met within months of his arrival.
Although el-Faisal claimed that he had no links to any organisation or mosque, suspicions were aroused by his work in the early Nineties as preacher and prayer leader at Brixton Mosque.
The South London venue was attended by both Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged “twentieth hijacker” in the World Trade Centre attacks, and the “shoebomber” Richard Reid, although el-Faisal denied meeting either man.
Police investigating possible al-Qaeda links were further alarmed to discover that he had been leading study circles with young Muslims at Tipton in the West Midlands. The town is home to three Britons who are incarcerated in Camp X-ray in Cuba under suspicion of being Taleban fighters.
His measured Jamaican lilt hinted at a past far removed from his vocation. El-Faisal was born William Forrest, the second of four children, and he grew up in a fervently Christian family in St James on Jamaica’s western coast, near Montego Bay.
The family had close links to the Salvation Army, which el-Faisal’s parents retain. He developed an interest in Islam at 16 after meeting Saudi Arabian visitors at a religious camp.
On leaving the Caribbean in 1983, he travelled first to Guyana, where he took a course in Arabic, before enrolling for a degree in Islamic studies at the Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Mohammed University in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
It was there that el-Faisal’s outlook became dramatically more militant, inspired by the teachings of another Saudi resident, Osama bin Laden.
On instruction from sponsors in Riyadh, el-Faisal came to Britain. Police believe that the immaculate dresser, who travelled between lecture venues in an elderly Mercedes saloon, had claimed benefit and earned money from recordings of his lectures.
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