A radical cleric once described as “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe” was freed on Monday from a British prison to live under virtual house arrest after a court ruled that his detention without trial was unlawful.
The Jordanian preacher known as Abu Qatada must wear an electronic tag to allow the police to keep track of him, spend 22 hours a day at his family home and is banned from using the Internet and mobile phones.
Twice convicted in his absence in Jordan of involvement in terrorist plots, Britain says he is still a national security risk and should be deported before London hosts the Olympic Games in July and August.
Britain says videotapes of his sermons were found in a German apartment used by three of the people who carried out al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US.
Qatada was released from the high-security Long Lartin prison in central England on Monday night, a source familiar with the case said. The government declined to comment.
Television pictures showed him being driven out of the prison in a van.
The 51-year-old, whose real name is Omar Othman, has been in and out of jail since he was first detained without charge under British anti-terrorism laws in 2002.
Qatada, a father-of-five who had been living in London, denies belonging to al-Qaeda. If he returns to Jordan, his lawyers say he risks being tortured or retried using evidence extracted from others using torture.
Under strict bail conditions, he will only be allowed out of the house for two hours each day and visitors must vetted. Qatada cannot go to mosques or lead prayer sessions.
His bail papers say that if he bumps into a friend in the street, he must “after any initial greeting, disengage himself from the situation whether by explaining the terms of his bail order or by making an excuse.”
The European Court of Human Rights ruled last week that his detention without charge was unlawful and that Britain must not send him to Jordan.
Seven European judges ruled that Qatada would not receive a fair trial in Jordan because evidence against him may have been obtained using torture.
His case has been a thorn in the side of successive British governments.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, under pressure from some in his Conservative Party to stand up to Europe, said last week it was “completely unacceptable” that Britain can not detain Qatada or deport him.
“We are committed to removing him from the country. We want to see him deported and we are looking at all the options for doing that,” Cameron’s spokesman told reporters on Monday.
The British Home Office and Qatada’s lawyers made no comment.
Human rights groups say he should stand trial in Britain. That is highly unlikely due to worries that some of the evidence against him was extracted using torture. Ministers also fear that a trial could compromise the work of the security services who investigated Qatada.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Three sisters from Ohio who inherited a dime kept in a bank vault for more than 40 years knew it had some value, but they had no idea just how much until just a few years ago. The extraordinarily rare coin, struck by the US Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could bring more than US$500,000, said Ian Russell, president of GreatCollections, which specializes in currency and is handling an online auction that ends next month. What makes the dime depicting former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt so valuable is a missing “S” mint mark for San Francisco, one of just two
RSS