How the Home Office makes life easy for Algerian terrorists
By Harriet Sergeant
(Filed: 27/10/2003)
Our asylum system is a terrorist's social service. We could not do more to welcome the enemy into our country and make him feel at home. We even provide means and a background from which he can operate in ease and safety.
Twenty North Africans have been arrested this month amid fears of an imminent terrorist attack. Of the 16 Algerians detained, including the ricin poison suspects, 10 appear either to be or to have been seeking asylum. The cases of 3,000 other Algerian asylum seekers are under urgent review. The authorities fear that among them lurk terrorist sleeping cells waiting to be activated. They also admit they do not know where many of these Algerians are.
We are now paying for years of immigration mayhem caused by a lack of political will and judicial irresponsibility. Years that Algerian and Moroccan terrorists have put to good use. Events last week reveal just how well the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) has exploited our asylum system in order to set up terrorist networks. The typical Algerian terrorist is a young man from a country where 35 per cent of the population is under 15 and half the people live in cities. He is usually educated and from the lower middle classes and, finding advancement blocked by corruption and economic mismanagement, turns to extreme forms of religion for status and purpose.
A survey carried out last year of Moroccan students reveals the pessimism that drives so many North African young men to migration and a small minority of them to terrorism. Eighty-two per cent at pre-university level wanted to emigrate to Europe; a similar percentage had already been refused a visitor's visa. Half affirmed this would not stop them from going, even if that meant doing so illegally. Of the university students, 52 per cent saw no improvement in their country's future. For Algerian youth, the civil war and membership of the GIA provided a purpose and an exit to Europe. Setbacks in the late 1980s forced the GIA to move their command headquarters to Paris and find other targets.
There followed a bombing campaign in Paris, masterminded in part from the Finsbury Park mosque, with arms and ammunition hidden in Belgium. This came to an end when Belgian police discovered not only the GIA arms dump, but even a field hospital, and that hundreds of Belgian passports had vanished from the Belgian foreign ministry. Some GIA terrorists departed to train with al-Qa'eda. Others came to Britain. Here, despite events in Paris and Belgium and despite citing membership of the GIA as the basis for their asylum claim, they were allowed to enter this country.
The GIA works in self-governing and self-financing cells. Ahmad Ressam, for example, who was caught planning to blow up Los Angeles airport, had been given $8,000 seed money, instructed to recruit a network and then to create mayhem in the country of his choice. How many such cells exist here? "God only knows," said one security expert.
Corrupt and incompetent, our asylum system is ripe for exploitation from terrorists such as the GIA. First, asylum seekers must depend on criminal gangs to bring them here. The gangs are organised and sophisticated. They can offer forged documents, prefabricated asylum stories and advice on the Geneva Conventions. The terrorist, with his contacts and funding, is able to purchase a superior story to the genuine asylum seeker.
On arrival, our asylum system allows the terrorist to re-create himself and assume a new identity. David Blunkett's advisers state that this is not the case. The key aim of terrorists, they insist, is to conceal their identity and they would not do that by applying for asylum.
The opposite is true. This is how it works. The gangs instruct their clients to turn up without documentation, as is their right under the UN Convention on Refugees. Free of documentation, a terrorist can take on any identity he chooses. It is impossible to prove, as I saw when I sat in on interviews of asylum seekers by the Home Office, who a person is, where he comes from or even his age.
Once in Britain, the terrorist discovers that the underworld of informal housing and forged documents that has sprung up for the asylum seeker and illegal immigrant also facilitates his purpose and hides him from the authorities. Every kind of document is available in London. The terrorist can get his photograph put into a stolen British passport for as little as £500.
In just one raid on the home of a Nigerian couple, police found some 13,000 forged documents, including blank electricity and gas bills, British and Nigerian birth certificates, driving licences and even nursing qualifications. The only genuine document in the house was a letter from the Home Office informing the wife that she had indefinite leave to remain in Britain. While we have been pretending that an immigration problem does not exist, a criminal world has grown up in which the terrorist can thrive and operate.
The French and Belgian ID cards found at the Finsbury Park mosque, many believed to be forged or stolen, reveal how diligently the terrorists have studied our immigration system. Europeans can travel on their identity cards to Britain. The French version, using technology 50 years out of date, is easy to duplicate. Two years ago, an immigration officer told me that stowing away in a lorry or on a train might grab headlines but the "major means of illegal entry" to Britain was on forged documents through the EU channel.
When immigration officers pointed out the widespread use of fake ID cards to the Home Office, it prevaricated. It feared travellers might get upset if they were stopped and questioned. The immigration officers persisted until the Home Office finally sent a note with the simple exhortation: "Do your best." Not quite enough, it seems, to deter the North African terrorist.
Now the authorities cannot find the 3,000 Algerian asylum seekers they want to interview. This will come as no surprise to anyone involved in the surreal world of our immigration service. One police superintendent sought information on the 300 asylum seekers turning up each month to report at his station. The Home Office reacted with an embarrassed silence. Finally it admitted it had not a single record of any of the asylum seekers. "That's not unusual," said the superintendent. "Their record system is shot to pieces." At the time, he was organising raids based on intelligence and made in conjunction with the immigration service to arrest rejected asylum seekers. But these were hampered by the Home Office's "useless record keeping".
Events last week demonstrate it is not just Home Office records that have been shot to pieces, but also the concept of asylum itself - not only by terrorists, but also by our own politicians and judges. The interests of the outsider are paramount: the security of the ordinary citizen, surely the first duty of any government, is all but forgotten.
This cannot go on. Tony Blair has hinted that Britain might drop out of the UN convention. That would be a start, but Britain would also need to seek an exemption, as the French have done, from Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which stops us from returning asylum seekers to countries where they might face persecution.
Harriet Sergeant is author of the CPS pamphlet Welcome to the Asylum