Terrorist 'sleepers' slip intelligence net
After Tuesday's raid on a Manchester flat, Paul Lashmar reveals the security failures that have left the UK vulnerable to attack
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On Tuesday night Alan Green, the Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, stood within a cordoned-off area in the suburb of Crumpsall and spoke to the press just hours after the stabbing of DC Stephen Oake. The raid in which DC Oake was involved, he said, was linked to the discovery days before of a makeshift ricin laboratory in London operated by an Algerian terror cell. A day later the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, spoke. The man who was the target of the Manchester raid, he said, "wasn't let go, wasn't forgotten about, was tracked by the security services to the point where we were about to arrest and deal with him".
The impression given was that the murder of DC Oake was a brutal outrage in the course of the methodical rounding-up of terror suspects who were being routinely and closely shadowed. But an investigation by The Independent on Sunday reveals a very different story. For there is increasing concern among security and intelligence officers that the asylum system and Britain's lax security at minor ports has allowed in hundreds of would-be terrorists to live here as 'sleepers' – whereabouts, identities and numbers unknown.
The raid on the nondescript flat in Crumpsall was a case in point. Greater Manchester Police had made the raid to detain an Algerian asylum seeker. But, when they got there the officers, including a liaison officer from Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch, were surprised to discover two other North Africans in the flat. It was the arrest of these two men under the Terrorism Act 2000, and the decision to launch a full-scale forensic search of them and the premises, that appears to have sparked the attack, which led to the stabbing of DC Oake. And, it turned out, Kamel Bourgass, the 27-year-old man now in custody charged with the detective's murder, was one of the "unknowns" that intelligence officers fear are here in increasing numbers: a failed asylum-seeker who had evaded deportation. The police did not even know he was in the flat until they got there.
Security experts point out that Bourgass and the other "unknown" were clearly not, as Mr Blunkett said, being tracked. "MI5 and Special Branch do not have the resources to monitor all the suspected terrorists in the country," said one expert.
At least 40 al-Qa'ida-linked Islamist extremists based in Britain are now under surveillance by the security service, but there are many others going unmonitored. MI5 believes that between 500 and 600 British-based Muslims spent time in al-Qa'ida training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan prior to the attacks of 11 September. Training ranged from small arms to the use of chemical and biological weapons.
Then there are the "unknowns". Intelligence sources complain they have their work cut out due to Government failure to control immigration. "We are trying to shut the stable door on terrorism, not because the horse has bolted but because it has got in and disappeared," said one source.
Sources say that next month the Home Office will release figures which will show that 110,000 immigrants applied for asylum in 2002. This is 40,000 more than in the previous year, and the biggest ever influx of immigrants claiming safe haven in Britain. It reveals the size of the task facing security services in identifying terrorists that arrived among legitimate refugees. "For the most part we do not have the faintest who asylum-seekers really are," said one officer. "The top and most determined terrorists do not apply for asylum but slip into the country through the quieter ports with lax security or use false papers."
Once in Britain they exist in a semi-criminal subculture, surviving by credit card fraud and identity theft.
The discovery of the ricin laboratory showed the threat from Algerian fundamentalist terrorists, who are regarded as among the most dangerous al-Qa'ida sympathisers, hardened in the desperate 10-year civil war in their home country.
Security officials insist that for the last five years it has been too easy to enter Britain, and an Algerian refugee leader said earlier this week that he believes that up to 100 known terrorists have come to Britain in the past two years alone.
Dr Mohammed Sekkoum, chairman of the Algerian Refugee Council, has helped thousands of his fellow countrymen on arrival in Britain since the early 1990s. He said most were law-abiding people who camehere with nothing and strived to work hard. But since 2001 between 90 and 100 individuals who have committed terrorist acts in Algeria had come to Britain seeking asylum.
"If you are in the Algerian community you know these things," he said. "I know the names of many of these people. These people were killers in Algeria and now they are here. I have told the immigration service about them, but the authorities told me it was nothing to do with me."
A controversial immigration think-tank said yesterday that the Government must tighten up controls in face of the increased terrorist threat to the UK. MigrationwatchUK said that asylum-seekers who destroy their documents must be detained until their identities have been established through security checks. According to the think-tank, some 80 to 90 per cent of all asylum-seekers arrive with no travel or identification documents in order to make it more difficult for them to be removed. After a lengthy process costing some £700m a year, 90 per cent stay on, most of them illegally.
David Blunkett has tightened the system by introducing photocards for claimants and detention centres, yet the numbers trying to enter Britain continue to rise. Shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin said the Manchester stabbing proved Britain was struggling to cope with the terrorist threat: "It's further evidence that people are getting through the asylum system who intend to pursue terrorist activities."