Times:
HE CLAIMS to hate everything the West stands for. But yesterday it emerged that Osama bin Laden sought asylum in Britain even as he was planning the September 11 attacks on the US.The al-Qaeda leader wanted to abandon his base in Sudan at the end of 1995 and asked some of his followers in London to sound out whether he would be able to move to Britain.
Michael Howard, who was then Home Secretary, recalls how his aides told him of the asylum request from the Saudi-born militant of whom the world knew little of ten years ago. A number of his brothers and other relatives, all members of the wealthy bin Laden construction empire, owned properties in London by the mid-1990s.
The teenage bin Laden had reportedly toured Europe with his family and became an Arsenal fan, though there is no record of his ever having been to a match at Highbury.
The astonishing approach to the British authorities happened only months after bin Laden had secretly organised a terror summit in Manila in January 1995 to begin planning how hijackers would turn passenger planes into flying bombs. He called it the “Bojinka plot”, which is Arabic slang for an explosion.
By this time bin Laden had also transferred some of his considerable personal fortune to London for his followers to establish terror cells here and across Europe.
...
Mr Howard said: “If he had come here to plot the attacks on the twin towers and the US had subsequently asked for his extradition, then by then, under the Labour Government’s laws, he could not have been sent because they refuse to extradite to a country which has the death penalty.”
Bin Laden had, according to Home Office officials, used a Saudi businessman, Khaled al-Fawwaz, to sound out his chances of coming to Britain.
Fawwaz, 41, had arrived in 1994 and was described by security chiefs as his “de facto ambassador” in Britain.
...
Comments
Post a Comment