The Sunday
Times,
Aug. 7, 2005
Insight Team: Ali Hussain and Jonathan Calvert
www.timesonline.co.uk0
While
On a Friday evening late in July a small group of young Asian men gathered
secretly in the grounds of a Victorian manor house on the edge of Epping
Forest, east of
Debden House, a property run as a bed-and-breakfast and campsite by Newham
borough council, was chosen because they were running scared.
Earlier that day police had arrested the remaining three suspects for the
failed 21/7
Among them was an undercover reporter from The Sunday Times. He joined a
football kickabout as they waited for their leader. Others practised
kick-boxing.
As they chatted the reporter was asked if he would be willing to wear a “strap”
— slang for a suicide bomb belt. He laughed the suggestion off nervously and
was relieved when everyone smiled.
At 8pm a bulky figure with a long beard and flowing white robe picked his way
across the open field in the twilight with the aid of a walking stick. Two
hours late, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed had finally arrived.
A Syrian with seven children who has lived on benefits for 18 years, this
extremist cleric has been investigated by police for using inflammatory
language but he has never been prosecuted.
Now, sitting cross-legged and picking at a bag of fried chicken and chips
donated by one of the group, Bakri addressed his followers. He was perturbed by
the day’s events.
Rather than express relief that the bomb suspects were in custody, he was
disgusted that two of the men, arrested in Notting Hill in west London, had
been made to strip down to their underwear.
There was, however, some consolation. Referring to the capture of the first
bomb suspect in
The meeting then took a more serious — and revealing — turn.
Referring to the speed with which police issued closed-circuit television
pictures of the suspects in the
Choudhury: “It’s CCTV, sheikh; that’s the killer. You can’t go anywhere without
them monitoring you now: down the street; out the station.”
Bakri: “There is million of pictures on CCTV. None of them said this man or
this man . . . but when somebody speak, saying my son is this, my son is that,
they will take picture of son and they will look at CCTV.”
Choudhury: “Oh yeah, when somebody gives them a picture, then they can follow
them around . . .”
Bakri: “People got big mouths. That’s why the link to the family is not going
to help. These people should be completely rootless. That’s why Sheikh Osama
(Bin Laden), he build all people young. He train the youth.”
Bakri suggested that people were pointing the finger of blame for the attacks
at his group.
Choudhury replied: “Sheikh, they’re looking for the planners and the eggers-on.
We fall into the later (sic) category. We’re not planning anything.”
DURING a two-month undercover investigation The Sunday Times has amassed hours
of taped evidence and pages of transcripts which show how Bakri and his
acolytes promote hatred of “non-believers” and “egg” their followers on to
commit acts of violence, including suicide bombings.
The evidence details how his group, the Saviour Sect, preaches a racist creed
of Muslim supremacy which, in the words of Bakri, aims at one day “flying the
Islamic flag over
In his two months with the sect, our reporter witnessed a gang of Bakri’s
followers brutally beating up a Muslim who challenged their views. He listened
as a succession of “religious leaders” ridiculed moderate Muslims and
repeatedly justified war against the “kuffar” — non-Muslims.
He discovered that the core of the group consisted of about 40 young men guided
by a handful of spiritual mentors. Many are of Bangladeshi origin, jobless and
living in council flats in east
At their meetings — which often included school-age teenagers — they were fed a
constant diet of propaganda warning that the kuffar are out to destroy them.
Integration with British society is scorned, as is any form of democratic
process. Followers are encouraged to exploit the benefits system. They avoid
jobs which could bring them into contact with western women or might lead them
to contribute to the economy of a nation they are taught to despise.
In regular lectures and sermons it is instilled into them that Islam is a
religion of violence. While publicly they did not defend the
Bakri, who faces possible deportation with the introduction of new terror laws
announced by Tony Blair on Friday, was taped saying that he had been “very
happy” since the July 7 London bombings, which killed 52 people. After the second
attacks, he described the bombers as the “fantastic four”.
The undercover reporter, who has a Muslim background, first approached the
group as a potential convert in June, three weeks before the first
The sect and its interchangeable sister organisation, Al-Ghuraaba, were created
after Bakri claimed to have closed down his militant extremist group
Al-Muhajiroun last October.
The activities of Al-Muhajiroun, which notoriously praised the September 11,
2001 hijackers as the “Magnificent 19”, had been extensively investigated by anti-terrorist
police. However, as The Sunday Times discovered, the Saviour Sect and
Al-Ghuraaba were Al-Muhajiroun in all but name.
The sect came to prominence during the general election in April when it
launched an intimidatory campaign against fellow Muslims to stop them voting.
They were captured on film yelling and attacking members at a meeting of the
mainstream Muslim Council of Britain.
George Galloway, the Respect party MP for Bethnal Green, east London, claimed
that they made death threats against him when they disrupted one of his
election campaign meetings, shouting him down as a “false prophet”.
At the time Bakri denied any connection to the sect and he has continued —
publicly at least — to keep his distance from it. But members openly talked of
him as their spiritual leader when our reporter first approached them.
They invited the reporter to attend one of their meetings that evening. It was
to be the first of many lectures and sermons that he attended.
As he entered the entrance hall of the red-brick YMCA building in Beckton he
was met initially with suspicion. Abdul Muhid, one of the sect’s leaders,
questioned him closely. Within minutes Muhid, 22, was explaining that most new
recruits were former heroin addicts who had found salvation.
Another man, Nasser, in his early twenties with a wispy henna-speckled beard,
implored our reporter to “unlearn” the brand of Islam that he had been taught
as a child and to adopt a new approach.
It was important to be unemployed,
There were other ways to opt out. “All the brothers drive without insurance,”
Bakri was the star attraction that night. Under bright fluorescent lights, he
preached to the 50-strong audience about the need for a violent struggle to
defend Muslims who, he claimed, were under constant attack.
With a new member in the audience, he added carefully that he was not actually
“inciting anyone to violence in the
The victim had struck up an argument with one of the group at the market stall.
When he threw a leaflet to the ground he was punched in the face and a fight
started. Up to seven members of the sect jumped on the man and began kicking
him as he lay on the floor. A late intervention by one of the other
stallholders gave him the opportunity to escape — his face swollen and
bleeding.
Unabashed, one of group, dressed in an Arabic shawl, shouted out to onlookers:
“You should not feel sorry for him. He is a kuffar and deserves it.” Aged
between 20 and 30, the members of the sect mostly wore traditional Islamic
clothing, although some were in jeans.
Later that day it emerged that the man who had been assaulted had been a member
of the moderate Young Muslim Organisation and was also a supporter of
One of the sect told the reporter that “the brothers” needed to calm down and
stop attracting attention to themselves in public. “They should have taken him
round the corner and beaten him there,” he said.
On July 3, Sheikh Omar Brooks of Al-Ghuraaba addressed the group at its
Saturday night lecture.
The 30-year-old, who comes from a
Occasionally sipping a can of Fanta and gesticulating wildly, he declared: “I
am a terrorist. As a Muslim, of course I am a terrorist.”
It was not just our reporter’s group who were present. Schoolchildren in
T-shirts bearing the words “mujaheddin” and “warriors of Allah” listened
intently as Brooks said he did not wish to die “like an old woman” in bed.
“I want to be blown into pieces,” he declared, “with my hands in one place and
my feet in another.”
Brooks — who caused an outcry last week when he told BBC2’s Newsnight that he
would not condemn suicide bombers — called on a group of burqa-clad women in
the audience to help the fight by making weapons.
He told the audience that it was a Muslim’s duty to stay apart from the rest of
society: “Never mix with them. Never let your children play with their
children.”
He added: “This hall is like our fortress against the kuffar and the so-called
Muslims like the McB (the Muslim Council of Britain).”
Warming to his theme, he said: “They will build bridges and we will break them;
they will build tall buildings and we will bring them down.” The audience
rippled with laughter at the obvious reference to September 11, 2001.
He told the audience that Islam was a religion of violence and that Muhammad
was the “prophet of slaughter, not peace”. He said Muslims must not be
defeatist as “even now the brothers in
As his three-year-old son played at his side, he launched into a bitter racist
attack. The Jews, he said, were “the most disgusting and greedy people on
earth”.
Four days after this meeting, on July 7,
The sheikh avoided difficult questions about the attacks by refusing to answer
his telephone. He advised all his followers to do the same in the case they
incriminated themselves. The sect closed down its meetings and stopped leaflet
campaigns, fearing reprisals.
While he was saying nothing publicly, Bakri did, however, address a private
meeting held for prayers at the Selby Centre in Wood Green, north
Before the prayers started, our reporter joined a small group of men sitting on
the floor of the dilapidated 1960s hall in a circle with Bakri.
Bakri sighed. “So,
He drew an analogy for his followers: “The mosquito makes the lion suffer and
makes him kill himself. If the mosquito goes up a lion’s nose then he will make
him go mad. So don’t underestimate the power of the mosquito.”
In his sermon during the prayer meeting he said that the July 7 attacks would
make people “stand up and listen”. He blamed the bombs on the West because they
had “raped and killed” innocent Muslims abroad.
Turning to concerns that “poor” people had been attacked in the bus bomb, he
argued that this was permissible because the British Army was drawn from
lower-income groups.
The congregation was instructed to avoid expressing disapproval of the attacks.
“If you cannot support what has happened, then at least don’t condemn it,”
Bakri said. If anyone were to ask what they felt about it, they should answer
that as Muslims they have no “feelings”, “ideas” or “personal judgment”.
He said that it was better instead to pray for the mujaheddin and to welcome
the “beautiful” news from
A member of the congregation who had brought along his two children told the
reporter after the sermon that the British could now feel the fear experienced
every day by Muslims. Another said that the bombs were “a good start” and asked
Allah to “bless those involved”.
The extent of the indoctrination of the members of the Saviour Sect became even
clearer during the two weeks in July which saw the failed second attempt to
bomb the
During the twice-weekly lectures and Friday prayers, men who had struggled to
find jobs and, in some cases, had drifted into drug abuse, were told that as
true believers they were better than non-Muslims.
“The toe of the Muslim brothers is better than all the kuffar on the earth,“
Bakri said in one sermon. “Islam is superior, nothing supersedes it and the
Muslim is superior.”
Other regular speakers claimed that Islam was constantly under attack in
One, who called himself Zachariah, claimed that the kuffar were trying to “wipe
out (Muslims) from the face of the earth”. He implored the group “to cover the
land with our blood through martyrdom, martyrdom, martyrdom”.
Zachariah preached that the non-believers were dispensable: “They’re kuffar.
They’re not people who are innocent. The people who are innocent are the people
who are with us or those who are living under the Islamic state.”
Another preacher, Abu Yahya, who is also reported to go by the name of Abdul
Rahman Saleem, argued that Muslims were constantly being subjected to
derogatory names by non-believers in an effort to demotivate them. The solution
was aggression.
He said: “It says in the Koran that we must try as much as we can to terrorise
the enemy . . . we terrorise those people who terrorise us.” His message to
The influence on the younger members of the sect was obvious. Nasser told our
reporter not to worry about those who died in the
This is not, of course, something that they would say in public. When Bakri
finally commented publicly on the bomb attacks, he condemned the deaths of
“innocents”. But this was not quite the remorse it seemed.
At Friday prayers, on the day after the second bomb attacks, there was a buzz
in the air as Bakri walked into the Selby hall in his brilliant white shalwar
kameez.
In the preamble to the sermon he referred to the bombers as the “fantastic
four”. He explained that his lament for the “innocent” applied only to Muslims.
It was a linguistic sleight of hand which he summarised as: “Yes I condemn
killing any innocent people, but not any kuffar.”
In the wake of the bombings, politicians and police have become increasingly concerned
that groups such as the Saviour Sect are radicalising disaffected young men
into potential terrorists.
On Friday the prime minister said that the successor groups of Al-Muhajiroun,
including the Saviour Sect, could be banned under new anti-terrorist proposals.
At a hastily arranged press conference in Chingford, Essex, in response to the
proposals, Bakri said the Al-Muhajiroun group had never supported terror
attacks in the
After Friday prayers, five cars full of sect members — including our reporter —
drove to Chingford to support him during his press conference. When they
arrived, however, they were greeted by Abu Yahya and told to leave quickly
without being seen.
One of the group later told our reporter that Bakri had not wanted it to appear
as if he were the leader of an organisation. He was still unwilling for it to
be known that he was the leader of the Saviour Sect.
Behind the scenes the rhetoric of the sect was not blunted by Blair’s
crackdown. Zachariah weighed in with a new bloodcurdling sermon at Friday
prayers at the Selby Centre.
“The message of Muhammad,” he told his young congregation, “is how to fight the
enemies of Allah; how to execute the enemies of Allah . . . how to return them
back to the Allah. Not just through da’wah (invitation); not just through being
kind to them; but with the sword.”
He added: “Tony Blair is a Christian. He went to the Pope to praise him . . .
and he went to
“To dismantle Islam. To divide and rule . . . him and his ancestors worked hard
from the crusaders in the beginning and then their empire building, installing
their proxy leaders.”
If the words were just as fiery, the sect was immediately becoming more
cautious about its public activities. When our reporter asked for more leaflets
and videos,
It appeared that the sect was covering its tracks and preparing to go
underground.