What is one to make of the ricin trial that has just resulted in the conviction of Kamel Bourgass, who was convicted last year of the murder of DC Stephen Oake, on a charge of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance with poisons and the acquittal of himself and four other defendants on the charge of conspiracy to murder, with the trial of a further four aborted?

The first point, adequately made in this morning’s press, is that the case is a graphic example of the lethal shambles of British immigration and asylum policy, that allowed this man to disappear into the country after his asylum claim was rejected.

The second point, which has all but been buried by the first, is the astounding and lethal incompetence of this bungled police operation that as a result left DC Oake dead. The Telegraph recounts the litany of grievous police errors:

‘Special Branch officers were supposed to have carried out comprehensive surveillance of the flat in advance. But this failed to uncover the fact that there were three, rather than two, suspects in the flat. The extra man was Bourgass. The pre-operation briefing took place in a noisy police station garage as a new shift was clocking on. At least one officer had difficulty hearing. Members of the 23-strong team were told that they would be raiding two addresses. It later emerged that those going to Crumpsall did not know that their target flat was on the ground floor. There was, according to the prosecution at Bourgass's trial, "little or no contingency plan" to cover the possibility of someone else being there.

'The arrest team did not take specialist arrest kits and, having arrived at the flat at 4.25pm, Special Branch officers found that their police-issue mobile phones would not work. They had to borrow personal mobiles. Tactical Aid Unit (TAU) officers would normally have expected to break into the flat and secure it. On this occasion the Special Branch team, none wearing body armour, simply knocked on the door. TAU officers were used to handcuffing suspects in such circumstances. But in Crumpsall Lane they were under specific orders from Special Branch not to do so.’

And so on. The officer in charge of this debacle has reportedly been disciplined – but is still employed somewhere in the police service. In other words, no-one has taken responsibility for eye-watering professional incompetence which left an officer dead. Faced with a potential terrorist plot the consequences of which, according to reports, made the police and security world aware that they were in a race against time to prevent a terror attack using unconventional weapons, the police responded like the Keystone Cops. What faith can we possibly have that our security is being adequately safeguarded when presented with evidence like this – and with no-one prepared to address these failings?

After that, however, the story descends into the very deepest and most troubling murk. For we are now being told that what this story tells us is that there was no ricin, no conspiracy and no al Qaeda plot.

The police and Labour politicians have tried to present the outcome as some kind of triumph, proving that there was indeed a terrorist threat to the nation. On the contrary – this case was a presentational catastrophe. For apart from the murder of DC Oake, the prosecution went belly-up. Of nine defendants in related trials, only one has been convicted. The others have walked free, acquitted of conspiracy.

The result is that the anti-war left is having a field day. For activists such as radical solicitor Gareth Peirce, the maverick intelligence analyst Duncan Campbell and the anti-war media including a bunch of ‘security’ websites, the acquittals mean that Bourgass was a loner, there was never any al Qaeda plot and this threat was simply cooked up by Tony Blair to justify the Iraq war by creating a climate of fear.

This would mean that British intelligence and the British police were all lying too about Bourgass’s connections to al Qaeda, that he was ‘handpicked to be trained in the art of making and dispensing poisons’, as the Daily Mail reported.

It would mean a number of extraordinary coincidences. For this ‘loner’ just happened to be associating with a number of people who just happened to be veterans of the Al Qaida training camps in Afghanistan, where he himself just happened to have been trained, and who all in turn just happened to be engaged in activities which bore a remarkable similarity. As the Telegraph
reported, the police investigation:

‘…led to an address at Ethel Coleman Way, Thetford, in Norfolk. There, detectives found photo-copies of handwritten recipes in Arabic script for poisons and explosives, including ricin and cyanide. Fingerprints, later shown to belong to Bourgass, were found on them. It was, a senior source said, "the first tangible sign this group was engaged in something more malevolent than fund-raising fraudulent activity".’

Next, it would mean discounting as another astonishing coincidence the fact that the police were led to Bourgass by an al Qaeda terrorist, Mohammed Meguerba, who just happened to provide information all of which turned out to check out. As the Times reported:

‘He told his interrogators that he had been part of a group in London planning attacks using homemade chemical weapons. He had fled Britain two months before, after his arrest during the September police raids. He had been bailed and was ordered by his superiors to leave Britain. The 27-page memo on his interrogation, which may have involved the use of torture, detailed the plan to make poisons and gave the first hint of possible targets. It would not be a mass attack, but on chosen individual civilians. Meguerba said that his gang had discussed smearing toxic pastes or liquids on car and door handles around Holloway in North London. The aim was to trigger widespread fear and panic. The leader of the plot was identified as a man called “Nadir”, with whom Meguerba claimed to have filled two Nivea cream pots with ricin. Those pots have never been found. But one discovered in a wardrobe contained a nicotine poison. He did not know the address where he and “Nadir” had worked on their formulas, but his description of how he travelled there led police to a two-bedroom flat above a pharmacy on Wood Green High Road in North London.

Much is being made of the fact that the initial report that ricin was found being found in turn by one Porton Down to have been wrong and then misreported by a Porton Down expert. Apart from apparent incompetence by this second expert, we are apparently supposed to deduce that this means — what, exactly? No ricin, no problem? But all the ingredients for making ricin, the castor oil seeds, the apparatus, the recipe — and the instructions for a bomb — were all found in that flat. Maybe he hadn’t yet got round to mincing up his castor-oil beans. Maybe he had and it’s in the missing Nivea pot. What difference does it make that no ricin was found? In what sense was this not a ricin factory?

Even more is being made of the claim that the ricin recipe found in the possession of Bourgass differed in certain details from the one on the al Qaeda handbook, and that such recipes are two a penny on the internet. This was claimed by Duncan Campbell in the Guardian,
who suddenly revealed today that he had argued this point in court with the Porton Down folk who were claiming a seamless connection between Bourgass’s recipe and al Qaeda’s.

Clearly, this issue of the ricin recipe is set to become a major growth industry for anti-war anoraks and conspiracy theorists (or perhaps in these circumstances, that should read ‘anti-criminal-conspiracy theorists’, on the basis that the only conspiracies they believe in are ones run by the state). The bottom line for the rest of us, however, is that in all this murk we simply haven’t got a clue who is telling the truth for the simple reason that none of us heard any of this evidence.

We read that the al Qaeda connection evidence wasn’t put to the jury. Why not? We don’t know. The whole wretched series of ricin trials has been conducted in total secrecy, with reporters forbidden to say anything about it — or indeed, about other terrorist trials that are pending. As a result, we are left in the dark. Virtually nothing has been reported about the evidence apart from patchy and inadequate stuff today. The vast majority of these trials consisted of legal argument held in the absence of the jury. All we do know is that politicians are making hay with this, that the police have been shown to be utterly incompetent and that a vitally important series of trials has ended in a judicial debacle. In the absence of any credible sources producing credible information, the outcome is going to be yet more cynicism, more confusion and more outright disbelief about the terrorist threat.

Guess who is laughing all the way to the bomb factory.

Posted by melanie at April 14, 2005