"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. "
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Just imagine, if they hadn't been able to interrogate him. All those bleeding hearts, who worry about the well being of the terrorists should read this article.
Thousands of deaths and chaos was prevented because a terrorist WAS interrogated.
The Sunday Times
April 17, 2005
Ricin defendants to claim asylum
David Leppard and Nick Fielding
Trial has made return ‘unsafe’
THE north African men who were cleared of involvement in the so-called “ricin plot” are to claim asylum so that they can remain in Britain.
Lawyers say the men face being killed or tortured if they return home because they were branded as terrorists during the case, which ended at the Old Bailey last week.
One defendant, Maloud Feddag, against whom all charges were dropped at an early stage, has already been granted indefinite leave to remain in the country. He persuaded the Home Office that the unfounded allegations against him made it impossible for him to live safely in Algeria.
Lawyers say the case, approved by the Special Immigration Appeal Commission (SIAC), has set a precedent that the other 10 wrongly accused defendants could use. Even though some of the men are still facing lesser charges involving false passport and immigration offences they will be eligible for free housing and welfare benefits and, if their application is successful, permanent residency status.
One of them is Sidali Feddag, Maloud’s younger brother, who was cleared last week. Julian Hayes, his solicitor, said an application for asylum had already been lodged last month.
Hayes said he had been advised by an immigration specialist that the application would be successful even though an earlier application before his arrest in 2003 had been refused.
“My client applied for asylum as a minor and it was knocked back by the Home Office. He has just renewed a fresh claim on the basis that it will be impossible for him to go back to Algeria without being tortured,” said Hayes.
The fact that police had prosecuted Feddag in the ricin case gave his client sufficient grounds to claim asylum. “It was enough for SIAC to grant his brother asylum, so it will be enough for him. I understand that all the other acquitted defendants will be applying for asylum as well,” said Hayes.
Senior Scotland Yard officers are putting on a brave face even though several privately admitted that the outcome of the case was “disappointing”.
Despite making 100 arrests in one of the biggest operations mounted by SO13, the Yard’s anti-terrorist branch, only one man, Kamel Bourgass, was convicted of a terrorist offence.
The case cost the taxpayer £20m. Of the 12 original defendants, 11 were acquitted or cleared before trial. Bourgass was convicted at an earlier trial of the murder of Detective Constable Stephen Oake, a Special Branch officer, during a raid on a house in Manchester. Oake may now be awarded a George Cross for confronting Bourgass.
The case sparked public alarm after Scotland Yard announced that traces of ricin poison had been discovered at a flat in Wood Green, north London, in January 2003. They were acting on information that Bourgass, who lived in the flat, had stored home-made ricin in two pots of Nivea cream.
Bourgass went on the run. He killed Oake and stabbed three other police officers when he tried to resist arrest two weeks later. In the aftermath of the killing, Tony Blair claimed that the case showed that terrorists were intent on launching “weapons of mass destruction”.
In fact, within two days of the raid on Wood Green, scientists at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, Wiltshire, had concluded that the initial test for ricin was a “false positive” and no ricin had been found anywhere, including in the Nivea pots. They only formally informed Scotland Yard about their new findings at a meeting in March.
Charges against the 10 Algerians and one Moroccan claiming they conspired to make chemical or biological weapons were quietly removed from some of the original indictments drawn up by the Crown Prosecution Service. Instead, prosecutors substituted charges of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” — a highly unusual charge dismissed by defence lawyers as a “Mickey Mouse” offence. Because of a gagging order granted by the court at the request of government lawyers, the fact that the chemical weapons charges had been dropped was not reported.
Porton Down admitted the agency was at fault but denied that it was involved in a cover- up: “There was a breakdown in our procedures. These have been notified internally and improvements have been made.”
Sources in the case say Andrew Gould, a scientist at Porton Down whose role was to liaise with Scotland Yard, has accepted responsibility for the bungle. Gould admitted in court that he had not passed on the test results and that the public had been misled as a result.
Julian Groombridge, Bourgass’s lawyer, said last night: “The evidence was wrong and the public was misled on ricin. This trial has been driven by politicians and the media.”
Andy Oppenheimer, a consultant on chemical weapons, said scientists at Porton Down were angry that the misrepresentation of their work may have been “politically motivated”.
A book by Yossef Bodansky, a terrorism writer, claims the existence of a chemical weapons plot in Europe emerged during Israeli interrogations of Palestinian guerrillas who said they had seen Islamists being trained to make poisons, including ricin, at a military complex in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2002.