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Sunday Telelgraph

17/04/2005

The police might not be allowed to arrest the next ricin terrorist

By Alasdair Palmer

(Filed: 17/04/2005)

One of the notable things about Kamel Bourgass, the murderous Algerian convicted of conspiring to "cause a public nuisance" by using ricin and other poisons to kill people, is that the police did not discover his plot by their own efforts. One of his co-conspirators, a man called Mohammed Meguerba, was arrested on fraud charges and skipped bail, fleeing to his native Algeria. He was picked up by the authorities there, and interrogated.

Meguerba told the men who questioned him that he had been part of a plot to poison people in Britain. The Algerians told the British - and armed with Meguerba's information, the police eventually found the flat in north London where poisons were being made, and later Bourgass himself.

The critical information therefore came through a route which may soon be ruled illegal. In a few weeks' time, the Law Lords will hand down their decision on the tricky question of whether in the fight against terrorism Government agencies, including the police, should be able to use information that has come from foreign states known to use torture.

The Algerians have certainly used torture in the past, and could have used it in Meguerba's case (although there is as yet no evidence that they did so). The Court of Appeal, by a two to one majority, has ruled that it is acceptable to use information that has the suspicion of torture hanging over it. But the Lords may very well decide to do what they did in the case of the Belmarsh detainees: over-rule the lower court, and go on to issue a ringing condemnation of the "use of torture by proxy".

Such a ruling would undoubtedly have catastrophic implications for the police's ability to frustrate terrorists - as can be seen from the Bourgass case. Whether Algerians actually tortured Meguerba is not the point. According to the legislation which will be critical to the Law Lords' ruling - the Human Rights Act and the Convention on Torture - the only issues are that the Algerians are known to use torture and might have used it to get Meguerba to talk. The Law Lords could well decide that it is incompatible with the "absolute prohibtion on torture" to use information that comes from such a source.

If the police cannot use information that might have been obtained by torture in another land, will it matter? There are plenty of people who think not - and the Law Lords, to judge by their decision in the Belmarsh case, may be among them. The sceptics think the very idea that we face mortal danger from al-Qaeda and its associated organisations is a colossal con-trick, got up by the Government to try to justify its decision to invade Iraq. They think that the Bourgass case supports their view. Bourgass, they say, was an incompetent loser, and a loner to boot. He failed to make any ricin at all - and if he had done, it wouldn't have harmed anyone. He wasn't really even a terrorist, just a man who happened to murder a policeman when he was arrested.

The facts about Bourgass, however, demonstrate the exact opposite: they show he was a very dangerous terrorist, who was only stopped from perpetrating mass murder because the police managed to detain him before he was able to do what he wanted, which was to kill as many people in Britain as possible. Ricin is indeed not a very efficient poison for killing large numbers - but it wasn't the only toxin that Bourgass had recipes for producing, and wasn't the only one he was intending to make. He had instructions for botulism and cyanide as well, which can easily be used to kill very many people. He also had detailed instructions for building bombs - bombs that, had they been placed in a crowded shopping centre, or on a train, or in a station, would also have killed hundreds of people.

Bourgass was a member of an Algerian terrorist network organised by Abu Dohar, who met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998 to discuss "co-operation and coordination between al- Qaeda and Algerian terrorists". (Abu Dohar is awaiting extradition to the US from Britain on charges of trying to blow up Los Angeles airport.) Algerian terrorists came to Britain in large numbers after the French authorities began a crackdown in the wake of the bombings in Paris that killed 12 people and injured several hundred in 1995. They were responsible for the Madrid train bombings, which killed 192.

The instructions Bourgass had for bomb-making demonstrate his connection to al-Qaeda. They are identical to the instructions for making bombs found at the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They are also nearly identical to the instructions used to construct the bomb that damaged the World Trade Center in 1993.

Prior to that bombing, the FBI had a source within the group - who also seemed to be a bunch of hopeless losers - planning the attack. He warned his superiors that it was imminent. The FBI's response was very similar to that of today's sceptics: "Relax. It's not going to happen here." It did. Six people died and hundreds were injured.

When the main perpetrator, Ramzi Yousef, was finally arrested, he boasted that "next time, we'll bring down both towers". The FBI didn't take his threat seriously, although he was known to be closely related to a then obscure organisation called al-Qaeda and its leader bin Laden. Then the second attack on the World Trade Center happened - and al-Qaeda brought down both towers, fulfilling Yousef's threat and killing more than 2,000 people.

What, I wonder, would be enough to convince the sceptics that there is a real threat that al-Qaeda will perpetrate an outrage of that kind here? Perhaps only an explosion that kills several hundred people in a British city would be enough. That explosion may happen a great deal sooner than the sceptics think.

There are two further sets of trials of Islamic fundamentalists pending: one of a group that planned to cause a series of explosions in London using ammonium nitrate, and a second for another group that attempted to acquire, according to the indictment, "radioactive materials, toxic gases, chemicals" for the purpose of murder.

I do not know the extent to which the police's interception of any of these alleged plots was the result of information from a foreign state which might have used torture to obtain it. But the use of that kind of material in the Bourgass case shows that our ability to frustrate fundamentalist terrorism can depend on torture, even though no one here tortures anyone.

The suggestion that torture could have been employed might persuade the Law Lords that the police and other Government agencies should never use such information. Judges, and the Government, and even the rest of us, could then feel that we had "clean hands" unsullied by any connection with torture. But it will almost certainly ensure the deaths of many Britons in attacks that could have been prevented. I wonder how many people think that is a price worth paying for ensuring that our system of law and order is untainted by any connection with torture?

Sunday Telegraph

This trial was not a success. It's a disaster

By Melanie Phillips

(Filed: 17/04/2005)

After Kamel Bourgass was convicted last week of plotting to make poisons and sentenced to 17 years in prison, ministers sprang to the microphones to claim that the jury's verdict in the ricin trial proved that they had told the truth about the terrorist threat to Britain. But this was far wide of the mark. On the contrary, it was a disaster for those who believe that such a threat exists.

The acquittal of eight of the nine defendants allowed the opponents of the Government's behaviour in Iraq to claim that Bourgass was merely a lone and ineffectual nutcase, that there was no al-Qa'eda conspiracy, and that the threat of a ricin plot was simply cooked up by Tony Blair to justify the Iraq war by mendaciously fuelling a climate of fear, as he had done over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The prosecuting authorities effectively stand accused of suborning justice to shore up support for an unjustifiable war. Duncan Campbell, the maverick intelligence analyst, has pooh-poohed the claim that Bourgass's ricin recipe came from al-Qa'eda, and insisted instead that he downloaded it from American internet sites.

Some lawyers involved in the case suggested that the evidence by Bourgass's alleged co-conspirator was obtained under torture. And, in The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins wrote that there was no ricin, no al-Qa'eda plot and that anyone who was alarmed about such a thing was insane. Reality's boot, however, may be on the other foot. For it is surely the Government's opponents who filter everything through the distorting prism of their obsession that Britain was taken to war on a lie.

Evidence suggests that the trial itself was politicised, with the wholly unconnected war in Iraq being dragged in at every opportunity. The jury never actually heard some of the most crucial evidence. It all raises urgent questions about whether the adversarial knockabout and courtroom gamesmanship that characterise the criminal court system can cope with trials of this nature, where public safety is said to be so gravely at risk.

Government opponents claim that because no ricin was found there was no plot. But the charge was conspiracy, not production. Whether or not ricin was actually manufactured is irrelevant. What was found was the means to make a variety of poisons in a flat stacked with poison recipes, equipment and plans for making explosives - along with a pot of nicotine toxin. In what sense was this not a poisons factory? In what sense was Bourgass not involved in a terror plot?

Next, the anti-war camp claims that Bourgass was a loner. Evidence by Mohamed Meguerba, the Algerian informer, who claimed that both he and Bourgass had been in the ricin plot together, has been attacked on the grounds that he was forced to say this under torture. But the police found the poison factory in Wood Green, north London, only because of Meguerba's information. Indeed, virtually everything Meguerba told them checked out. So are we supposed to believe that this was merely an astonishing coincidence, or evidence perhaps of Meguerba's psychic powers to detect the ''loner'' Bourgass?

What's more, although the jury acquitted Bourgass's four co-defendants in the dock, it nevertheless found him guilty of conspiracy with Meguerba, currently in an Algerian jail. And Bourgass himself said that he had copied out the poison recipes at Meguerba's request. So, by both his own account and that of the jury, he was not a loner at all.

Although some of Meguerba's evidence has been contradictory and inconsistent, security forces believe that he was part of an al-Qa'eda cell. He told the Algerian authorities that he was trained for terror activities in Europe, that he and Bourgass had received poisons training in Afghanistan's terrorist camps and that they had prepared two pots of ricin in the Wood Green flat. However, his evidence was never put to the jury because the defence successfully argued that, since he was not available for cross-examination, it was inadmissible.

Other crucial evidence was also not heard. The police found two recipes for ricin in Bourgass's handwriting. These are what Duncan Campbell says were identical to the recipes found on American internet sites.

This may be true - although in itself it proves nothing, since there is no reason why al-Qa'eda terrorists might not have got their poisons information from the internet. Indeed, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey, California, the ricin recipe in an al-Qa'eda military manual, Declaration of Jihad Against the Country's Tyrants, appears to have been translated nearly word for word from The Poisoner's Handbook, an underground pamphlet originally published in America.

In any event, the police case that there was a direct link between Bourgass's recipes and al-Qa'eda was never actually put to the jury. Their argument was that his recipes - which were not just for ricin but other poisons such as botulinum and nicotine - were identical to a large number of poisons recipes seized by the British and US military from the Afghan camps, and that, although there were subtle differences between them, their common origin was clear.

But the court never heard this evidence. Since the prosecution was unable to produce the soldiers who had found all this material in Afghanistan, it needed the defence to accept that it had indeed been found in the camps. But the defence made no such concession, and said it would challenge the prosecution's claim about its provenance.

The prospect thus loomed of a protracted battle between expert witnesses on either side. The prosecution concluded that this would leave the jury unable to decide which expert was right. The result was that the link with the Afghan documents could not be argued, and the full range of witnesses lined up from Porton Down to give their views on Bourgass's recipes was never called.

According to the prosecution, a wealth of fingerprints by several of the defendants was found on photocopied poison recipes and bottles of chemicals. But the defence insisted that the men had handled all this material in innocence, not realising what it was.

According to the police, the defence made significant use of another, far more explosive argument - that the whole police investigation was a political set-up to bolster the case for war in Iraq.

Defence counsel, say the police, repeatedly referred to the Iraq controversy. They claimed that the police investigation was going on while the Government was softening up the public for war; they made references to the "dodgy dossier", and said that everyone now knew how unreliable intelligence was.

In fact, the police investigation that had started in the summer of 2002 was originally aimed at uncovering passport and credit-card scams. Only when the trail led to an address in Thetford, Norfolk, did detectives stumble across photocopies of handwritten Arabic recipes for poisons and explosives.

Of course, no one knows what influences a jury. But, given the widespread public anger about what is generally believed to have been the flawed intelligence and lies told about Iraq, it is more than likely that this drip-drip of insinuations about dodgy intelligence would have struck a powerful chord and undermined the prosecution case.

Moreover, the conduct of the trial hardly lent itself to a clear overview of the evidence. It kept stopping and starting - sometimes for what seemed to be bizarre reasons. For example, when the defence claimed that the Algerian authorities mistreated Algerian exiles, the trial was stopped for a month so that every government department could trawl for evidence of whether the Algerian government might do anything to harm their nationals abroad.

In the eight months of the trial, the jury heard only about four weeks of evidence. The rest was legal argument. Indeed, after the evidence was heard there followed many weeks of yet further legal argument, after which the jury retired to consider its verdict. How can jurors be expected to have the evidence in the forefront of their minds in such fractured circumstances?

The defence would doubtless present a robust challenge to this prosecution view of the trial. The problem is that, because of draconian reporting restrictions, none of the evidence was reported at the time. So it is hard now to form an authoritative view. And this information vacuum lends itself to political manipulation.

Meguerba's allegations of an al-Qa'eda connection were alleged to have been extracted under torture in Algeria. In fact, no one knows how he was treated by the Algerians after they arrested him on terrorism charges. But he was interrogated for three days by an Algerian judge in the presence of British antiterrorist officers, who say they saw no evidence of his having been ill-treated and that he was "remarkably sprightly" and "particularly cocksure".

And it was in these interviews that the police say Meguerba said that Bourgass had been trained in the Afghan camps in the making and use of poisons, that he and Bourgass had made ricin in the Wood Green flat, and that there were two pots of the stuff hidden in a cupboard. So this evidence was not extracted under torture.

Defence lawyers spoke dismissively of a "massive conspiracy tapestry woven by the prosecution". But, to the anti-war camp, any actual terrorist conspiracy has to be denied because the only possible conspiracy is one that is perpetrated by the state.

The political climate is one of fevered irrationality in which, because Messrs Blair and Bush stand accused of having exaggerated the terrorist threat, it is believed that anything they have ever claimed demonstrates such a threat must by definition be untrue - regardless of the evidence. The outcome is that a police investigation that destroyed the nucleus of a terrorist cell is misrepresented as a politicised operation.

This trial has been seized upon by both Labour and Tory politicians to make political points. But the real politicisation has taken place in the courtroom, where the law has shown itself to be not only inadequate to deal with the threat of terror but also unable to escape the long and baleful shadow of the Iraq war.