From the Telegraph
The security services are probing British links to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack after it emerged one of the two suspects was mentored by an Abu Hamza lieutenant based at Finsbury Park Mosque.
Cherif Kouachi, 32, is a disciple of al-Qaeda lynchpin Djamel Beghal, who allegedly recruited the shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 attacks, at the north London mosque. Beghal, an Algerian who sometimes calls himself Abou Hamza, after his idol, once boasted that he had set up a vast network of terrorist cells in Britain, as well as in Germany, France and Spain.
Although Beghal’s web of terrorist cells was thought to have been dismantled after he was arrested in 2001 following allegations of a bomb plot, he recruited Kouachi in prison ten years ago, suggesting he was trying to build a new network. Beghal was released from a ten-year prison sentence in 2010, and investigators will want to establish whether he could have used his long-standing contacts in the UK to set up sleeper cells here.
French-Algerian Cherif Kouachi was jailed in 2008 for arranging for jihadists to travel to Iraq. While in prison he met Beghal, who had been jailed for “belonging to a criminal association in relation to a terrorist undertaking”.
Beghal, 50, is known to have been a member of Takfir-wal-Hijra, a puritanical extremist group financed by Osama bin Laden before Bin Laden distanced himself from them for being too extreme, as it regarded non-extremist Muslims as “infidels” who are legitimate targets.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Beghal was suspected by European intelligence agencies of being the man chosen by al-Qaeda to open a terror front in Europe, beginning with the planned suicide attack on the US Embassy in Paris. After he was arrested at Dubai airport in July 2001, Beghal told his interrogators he would travel around Britain in the late 1990s recruiting young Muslims for jihad. Even among the many extremists who congregated at Finsbury Park Mosque, he was regarded as one of the most dangerous.
“Members of this group would kill their own fathers if they caught them smoking or drinking,” said one moderate Algerian who met him.
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One Response
Well, if he *was* linked to the mosque, then why in heaven’s name are not the British authorities seizing their chance to raid the place, in a massive display of overwhelming force, search it from attic to basement (and all associated premises), and arrest and interrogate all its gang bosses? Any evidence of nefarious activity and incitement to treason/ sedition found? – then shut the damn place down, *permanently*. If it isn’t in ‘heritage’ premises, then…demolish it, right down to basement level, and redevelop the site for a secular use.
It’s no different from a “crack house” or bikie den or mafia/ organised crime HQ – indeed, it’s orders of magnitude worse.