Putting the terror suspect on trial would quite simply embarrass MI5
Why can't Abu Qatada be tried in Britain? Though he is wanted by Jordan, where he was tried in absentia on terrorist charges, he is also accused by MI5 of inciting terrorist acts while he has been in Britain. He was arrested and placed under a control order here.
The answer is that far too much embarrassing information about MI5 and the Met police would come out in court. When Abu Qatada (whose real name is Omar Othman) came to the UK in 1994 as a refugee, MI5 believed he was not dangerous. "All mouth" was how Whitehall officials described him. Comments by the well-known anti-terrorist Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón describing Qatada as the "spiritual head of the mujahedin in Britain" were dismissed by British security and intelligence sources as overblown rhetoric.
However, MI5 came to realise that Qatada's own utterances were not rhetoric but potentially quite dangerous and harmful. MI5 tried to approach him to try and persuade him to tone down his jihadist rulings, at least insofar as they were addressed to a potential audience here.
Qatada appeared to ignore MI5's approaches and in 2001 he began trying to justify suicide attacks. Questioned that year over alleged connections to a German jihadist cell, police found £170,000 in cash in his home, including £805 in an envelope labelled "for the Mujahedin in Chechnya".
MI5 said in a court statement that Qatada had been providing advice offering religious legitimacy to those "who wish to further the aims of extreme Islamism and to engage in terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings". Richard Reid, the failed "shoe bomber", and Zacarias Moussaoui, both jailed on terrorism charges, were said to have sought advice from Qatada. Some his sermons were found in a Hamburg flat used by some of those involved in 9/11.
Hours before a new anti-terrorism law allowing foreign terrorism suspects to be held without charge or trial, Qatada left his London home. Mysteriously, MI5 and the police could not find him anywhere. Several months later, he was discovered in a council house in Bermondsey, south London and incarcerated in Belmarsh jail. After the law lords ruled that his detention - and those of other foreigners held without trial - were illegal, Qatada was subjected to a control order.
Further reasons why MI5 and the police would not welcome a trial can be found in the circumstances surrounding the seizure by the CIA of two British residents - Jamil el-Banna, a Jordanian national, and Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi - in Gambia in 2002, leading to their rendition to Guantanamo Bay via Afghanistan's infamous Bagram jail. MI5 documents disclosed in court describe the attempt by MI5 and anti-terrorist police to recruit Banna as an informer eight days before he flew to Gambia for a business trip. Documents also show how MI5 passed to the CIA misleading information about Banna's alleged links to an attempt to smuggle parts for a bomb through Heathrow. Rawi had also helped MI5 to obtain information about Qatada. Banna had prayed in the same mosque as Qatada when they lived in Peshawar, Pakistan. Banna, Rawi, and Qatada later prayed in the same mosque in London. It was the disclosure of these links which forced the British government to press more vigorously for Banna and Rawi's release from Guantanamo Bay.
So the man once described as Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe remains in legal limbo. What might he, or Banna or Rawi, say, what documents would have to be disclosed, if a trial were held here?