Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  … during contact between the officer and Abdulkahar in a very narrow space on the half landing a shot was accidentally discharged from the (leading officer’s) weapon. We note that the safety catch was off, in accordance with police training for what was regarded as a high-risk entry, and the officer was wearing two pairs of gloves as part of his protective clothing.5

  The injury to Abdul Kahar was accepted by the IPCC as being serious enough to fall under the definition of grievous bodily harm, but because ‘there is no evidence of intent or recklessness’ there was no misconduct case to answer. Nor, apparently, was there any offence under health and safety legislation. ‘In issue,’ the report states, ‘is whether the discharge of the firearm was an accident about to happen’. In spite of the fact that there was ‘little doubt that the bulky clothing and gloves had an effect on the officer’s mobility and dexterity’ it was apparently not a case of an accident being about to happen.

  So that is alright then. A fully trained ‘specialist’ police firearms officer forces his way, with 14 others, into a family home in the early hours of the morning and starts climbing the stairs with his MP5 carbine ‘raised to an off aim position in front of (him)’ with the safety catch off. This, we are told, is a normal procedure for specialist firearms officers in such circumstances. The officer in question is wearing two pairs of gloves, so he doesn’t have full control of the trigger of his machine carbine, and doesn’t even know, according to the IPCC report, when he has inadvertently pulled the trigger. A man is shot in the chest and survives this normal procedure by pure good fortune. But there is no health and safety issue here.

  A subsequent IPCC report into the 150 odd complaints arising from the raid on 46 and 48 Lansdown Road lamented that ‘high-profile counter terrorist operations inevitably attract relentless media scrutiny. Speculative reporting, partial information, one-sided press conferences and selective leaks have been an unfortunate by-product of this case.’6 The IPCC investigation did not uphold the majority of the 150 odd complaints it was tasked with investigating, which I will come back to, but the story of what happened after Abdul Kahar was shot has to rely to some extent on ‘one sided’ press conferences.

  Mohammed Abdul Kahar told a press conference on June 13 that when he was lying on the ground after being shot a policeman struck him on the face with a gun before he was grabbed by one foot and dragged downstairs with his head banging on the stairs. At the same press conference, Abdul Koyair, who was also assaulted by a policeman on the stairs,7 confirmed that he had seen the officers hitting his brother after he had been shot. The suspects’ mother was brought out ‘screaming and crying’8 and Abdul Kahar, in a later interview with the BBC, talked about the police ‘brutally attacking my dad. He is 60 years old, he was half naked and they were beating him on the floor.’9

  The brothers’ parents were taken to join their neighbours at Plaistow police station while the brothers themselves were taken – in Abdul Kahar’s case via hospital – to Paddington Green high security prison where they were both detained for seven days on suspicion of the commission, preparation and instigation of acts of terrorism.

  A report filed by James Sturke for The Guardian later on the morning of the raid said that a few dozen police continued to patrol local streets that were still cordoned off. An ambulance, a police van and a dozen police officers in boiler suits remained outside the house, while three ambulances and at least 10 police vans were still to be seen at a nearby junction on Lansdown road. An air exclusion zone, preventing aircraft from flying under 2,500ft over a five-mile area of east London, had been set up. 10

  The seven-day search of the two houses was exhaustive, but no chemical bomb was found. ‘The family are going to be stunned when they see their house,’ a source told journalists from The Observer the following week, ‘the walls have been knocked down, the doors taken out. It’s a complete mess.’11

  Eight months later, the IPCC report into all aspects of this incident apart from the ‘accidental’ shooting of Abdul Kahar, which had been reported on separately two months after the raid, responded to complaints that the occupants of the two houses had been subjected to excessive force by officers: ‘We have no doubt that in the course of the operation the police were extremely robust with the occupants…. The combination of the threat the officers believed they were facing and the tactics they had been trained to use (to control and dominate) undoubtedly meant that they were very aggressive. This was, equally undoubtedly, very frightening for those on the receiving end.’ The report went on to say: ‘Nor do we doubt that an operation of that scale, with armed officers in protective clothing, would have been a terrifying ordeal for everyone involved.’

  The two brothers were acknowledged to have been the ‘victims of failed intelligence’, but that was apparently as far as their victimhood went. The IPCC investigators didn’t doubt that many of the other things complained about happened much as those living in the two houses claimed – including officers pointing their guns at the occupants, not identifying themselves as police, placing the occupants in ‘plasticuffs’, not giving them an opportunity to use the bathroom or take milk powder for the baby, and not giving any explanation for the police action. But it concluded that ‘the police are right to take no chances with public safety’, and that ‘the officers carrying out these actions were doing so in accordance with police tactics and operating procedures put in place to respond to an extreme threat. They do not therefore amount to individual misconduct.’

  The logic is elaborated on in the report’s conclusions and recommendations, which include the assurance that ‘we do not criticise the police for carrying out the operation, which had, at its heart, public safety’:

  It is clear that the highly dangerous nature of the threat police believed they were facing set the tone for the entire interaction. In these circumstances everyone in those houses would have been regarded as an unknown threat until it could be established otherwise. Aggressive commands, pointing of weapons, immediate handcuffing and refusal to accommodate requests are standard armed police tactics to control and dominate in the face of an unknown threat.

  IPCC Commissioner Deborah Glass, who was responsible for the report, stuck by this logic immediately after its publication, but was prepared to speak more freely about ‘the level of force used’:

  It is quite right that the level of force used will have raised the most serious concern. I know that some people will feel very strongly that individual officers should be disciplined. However, after much thought, I have concluded that the level of force has to be judged in the light of the officers’ beliefs that they were facing an extreme lethal threat not just to themselves but to the public and to the occupants of the houses themselves. None of this should minimise the deep and understandable sense of grievance felt by all those affected on what must have been a terrifying experience.12

  So that is also alright then. The ‘belief’ with which the police embark on such ‘interactions’ must be allowed to determine the level of aggression used. The ‘standard armed police tactics’ don’t explicitly include hitting people over the head with rifle butts in the interest of public safety, but the logic dictates that the more fervently the police believe in the acuteness of the danger they are facing the more aggressive – for which read ‘brutal’ – the tone of the interaction can be expected to be. So people are quite right to have the most serious concern about the level of force used in what must have been a terrifying experience for the victims, but they shouldn’t expect any of the officers involved to be disciplined. ‘We didn’t uphold any complaints about excessive force,’ Deborah Glass told the BBC, ‘although there is no doubt some of the residents were damaged (sic) by police actions.’13

  So, on the basis of ‘intelligence’ that the IPCC is conveniently not at liberty to discuss because it has been shared with the investigators on the understanding that it will remain confidential, 250 police officers are deployed f
or a raid on two terrace houses looking for a non-existent chemical bomb. In the course of this ‘anti-terror’ raid they terrorise the 11 occupants of the two houses; they assault at least three members of the public, including shooting one accidentally in the chest; they take nine people off to a police station without arresting them, which the IPCC acknowledges ‘must have been a confusing and frightening experience’; they detain two of them without trial for seven days; and they tear the two houses apart.

  While continuing to assert that ‘the police are right to take no chances with public safety’, the IPPC report recognised that: ‘The scale of the Forest Gate operation and its outcomes – the accidental shooting of Mohammed Abdulkahar, the widespread public exposure of individuals being suspected of terrorist offences and the lack of any apparent substance to the terrorist allegations leading to the raid – have caused significant public concern.’ The IPCC investigators could not quite bring themselves to recognise that it wasn’t a question of there being no ‘apparent’ substance to the allegations: there was no substance whatever to the allegations, ‘apparent’ or otherwise.

  Needless to say the IPCC report itself caused further significant public concern. The BBC reported that Asad Rehman, chairman of the Newham Monitoring Project, an anti-racism group that represented the brothers, had described the report as a ‘whitewash’. He will not have been the only person to do so. The impression that the report was a whitewash will not have been helped by Scotland Yard’s reported response: it was glad, it announced, that an independent body had concluded its actions at Forest Gate were proportionate, necessary and motivated by public safety.14

  Seven months after the event, Scotland Yard was still unashamedly trying to persuade the public that 250 police officers deployed to raid two terrace houses was ‘proportionate’. But it is unlikely that either Tony Blair or his Metropolitan Police Commissioner namesake, Sir Ian Blair, will, after reading the IPCC report, have been quite so effusively enthusiastic about the raid as they were in its immediate aftermath. At Prime Minister’s Questions twelve days after the raid, Tony Blair declared: ‘I stand 101% behind the police and the security services in the difficult work they do. And I do not want them to be inhibited in doing that work. They have to do what is necessary to protect the public and they do it in a very fine and outstanding way.’15 Sir Ian Blair was reported by the Daily Mail to have got his accolades in first:

  Sir Ian Blair faces new questions over his judgement after he publicly praised his officers for their ‘astonishing professionalism’ three days after the ill-fated Forest Gate raid. In his monthly message to 40,000 plus staff, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner said: ‘I do not think any other organisation in the world could have done what we did.’16

  Sir Ian was flattering his men: there are plenty of totalitarian states around the world with police forces and armies that could have done what his men did, even if they usually tend to want to keep that quiet.

  Scotland Yard’s ‘proportionate’ anti-terror raid was subsequently reported to have cost more than £2.2m.17 The London Evening Standard, which obtained the figures four months after the raid, revealed that this figure included ‘a police overtime bill in excess of £864,000 and a further £979,100 spent on officers’ salaries.’ £156,000 was spent on unspecified ‘specialist equipment’ used in the raid. A further £120,800 was spent on feeding officers, erecting barriers and restoring the two gutted houses after they had been searched by the police. This restoration took two months, during which the two brothers and their parents were accommodated in hotels at a cost of a further £90,500.

  While Scotland Yard might have regarded this as proportionate, it was not a verdict that was universally shared, not even by those involved in policing. The Evening Standard reported Damian Hockney, a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, as saying:

  The police are working at a time of unprecedented threats, and nobody would want the Met to cut corners in the fight against terrorism. But that doesn’t mean that we simply hand over a blank cheque. This is a staggering figure… There were question marks over many aspects of Forest Gate … it needs stressing that the size and cost of future operations must be proportionate.18

  As early as 11th June, nine days after the raid, another member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Murad Qureshi, had recognized that the police needed to learn from a ‘series of mistakes’ which, he said, ‘cover everything from the collection of intelligence and how you corroborate that, to the nature of the surveillance of suspects, through to how the suspects are actually dealt with, particularly in this case – how we find ourselves with one of the brothers shot and quite a lot of the slander that has been out in the press.’19

  So what precisely was the ‘failed intelligence’ of which the two brothers were the victims, but which was too confidential for the IPCC to divulge? Peter Clarke, the Metropolitan police’s deputy assistant commissioner and head of anti-terrorism, was reported in The Guardian on the day of the raid as saying:

  This operation was planned in response to specific intelligence. As always, our overriding concern is for the safety of the public. Because of the very specific nature of the intelligence, we planned an operation that was designed to mitigate any threat to the public, either from firearms or from hazardous substances. You will appreciate that I am not in a position to discuss details of the intelligence with you.’20

  Initial reports implied that the intelligence came from foreign sources and was received by the intelligence services. But, a week after the raid, the Independent on Sunday was reporting that ‘It is understood that the two men arrested in the raid knew the informant, and that an MI5 handler had checked out his story as “plausible”.’ 21 The same day, The Observer reported that ‘Scotland Yard (had) warned MI5 it had serious reservations about the credibility of the source … only hours before police stormed the suspects’ house in east London.’

  The Observer’s reporters were told by ‘Whitehall sources’ that these reservations had been ‘passed up the chain of command to senior officials in the office of Sir Richard Mottram, the government’s security and intelligence co-ordinator,’ but that the police had been ordered to go in despite the concerns. A Whitehall official was reported as saying: ‘It wasn’t the fact that the information was based on a single source, it was more that the police doubted the credibility of that source. The intelligence was doubtful…. There came a point when officials in the Cabinet Office were made aware that the police believed they were being placed in difficulty because of the quality of this intelligence.’22

  If Scotland Yard was unhappy about the credibility of the individual who had passed the crucial information on to the intelligence services, the obvious questions to ask are, first, who that informant was, and, second, why the relevant authorities were prepared to mount such a large scale operation on the back of information whose quality they didn’t trust. The latter question is readily answered if The Observer’s information was correct: the police mounted the raid in spite of their own reservations because government told them to.

  According to the Sunday Mirror, police and intelligence officials told reporters that the information was from a reliable single source who knew the brothers and whom the security services had dealt with before.23 Friends of Abdul Kahar and Abdul Koyai were said to believe that the single source was Mohammed Abu Bakr Mansha, a childhood friend of the two brothers. Mansha was at that time serving a six-year terror-related sentence, and has since been sentenced to ten years imprisonment for a racially and religiously motivated assault on two black non-Muslims in London.24 At his earlier trial on the previous terrorism charge Mansha’s own defence lawyer had disclosed that he had an IQ of 69 and had described him as an ‘utter incompetent.’25 Following his imprisonment in Belmarsh high security prison that January, Mansha had been visited by friends of the two brothers, after which the brothers became aware that they were under surveillance.

  Ra
ther than lamenting that ‘speculative reporting’ and ‘partial information’ were unfortunate by-products of this case, the IPCC would have done well to point to the connection between the two. In this instance the minimal information available led to speculation triggered by comments made by Mansha’s lawyer. Sara O’Keefe told Sunday Mirror reporters that her client had been moved from a category ‘A’ prison, Belmarsh, to a softer category ‘B’ jail just prior to the raid. She did not know why Mansha had been unexpectedly granted this favourable treatment, or ‘whether he unwittingly helped MI5.’26 A week after the Sunday Mirror article was published, by which time Mansha had been ‘put in segregation’ for his own safety, Sara O’Keefe issued a statement denying that Mansha had been the source.27

  If Mansha was, in fact, the source of the ‘failed intelligence’ that led to this abortive raid, one would beinclined to agree with the damning verdict of Crispin Black, an independent intelligence consultant retained by the BBC as an expert in terrorism, who is quoted by Susie Boniface in the Sunday Mirror article:

  To think that a prisoner with an IQ of 69 could be at the centre of this operation is sheer lunacy. If this is the ‘intelligence’ trigger for the raid it shows something has gone seriously wrong. Everyone knew about the surveillance – children were knocking on car windows asking officers who they were watching. If they were terrorists, they had plenty of warning. They also arrested them at home, where they could be near an explosive device, rather than at work.28

  If the two brothers knew that they were under surveillance, it is hardly likely that they would be manufacturing chemical bombs in the family home in Forest Gate, even had they been inclined towards terrorism. The February 2007 IPCC report stated that the intelligence related to ‘an allegedly highly dangerous explosive device that could be set off remotely’ which was believed to be in one of the two houses. But the report in The Observer ten days after the raid claimed that it had ‘emerged that the police had only expected to find a trigger or mechanism, not all the components to make a chemical weapon’ and quoted a person ‘familiar with the situation’ as saying that ‘it would be unique for bomb-makers to make entire bombs in a family house.’29