Even if there had been some substance to the intelligence, it is difficult to see how mobilizing the cast of hundreds could possibly have been justified. Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail is not someone whom one would instinctively associate with skepticism about UK security forces. His view of Islam can be inferred from his depiction of Muslims marching through London in protest against the Danish cartoons of Muhammed as ‘a vile mob’ and ‘a crowd of foaming Muslims march(ing) … in a spurious manufactured fit of fury’. Indeed, writing about this raid, he said: ‘The police must have had good reason to steam in team-handed. When it comes to the terrorist threat, I’m always prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.’ But even Richard Littlejohn was prepared to concede that ‘maybe the raid could have been carried out with more tact and less overkill’ and to acknowledge that it was ‘a bit over the top’.30
So what, then, was this all about? Perhaps an inkling is to be gleaned from Sir Ian Blair who, even when it was becoming increasingly clear that there was no explosive device to be found, went on record as saying that the search was a ‘symbol of the enduring threat we face and the professional dilemmas we must confront.’31 The search was a ‘symbol’. Deploying 250 officers on a military-style operation – it even had the distinction of a cold-war codename, ‘Operation Volga’ – on the strength of what was known to be suspect intelligence had a wider political purpose.
At one level it was clearly intended as an assertion of serious intent and a show of strength. The raid with its cast of hundreds and its leading players in their £156k worth of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) costumes and props was designed to be a spectacle. If there were doubts about the intelligence behind the raid, the risk analysis that had to be undertaken could only have come to the conclusion that there was a significant risk that nothing would be found. But the benefit of making a statement of intent and giving a show of strength was evidently seen to outweigh the cost of any damage to community relations and any reputational damage that would be bound to follow a spectacularly unsuccessful raid. If the raid was intended as a spectacle, any failure would be spectacular.
Whether it was part of the intention or not, the raid clearly had the additional benefit of serving as an advanced training exercise. The operational context allowed the police to discover that if your specialist firearms officers go in gung ho with the safety catches of their MP5 carbines off, but are so gloved-up that they can’t feel their triggers, there is a very good chance that they will accidentally kill someone.
Several factors lend weight to the likelihood of the raid having been seen, at least in part, as a training exercise. The BBC later reported that this was believed to have been the first operation in the country that involved firearms officers wearing CBRN protection suits.32 The imposition of the air exclusion zone makes sense as one component of a large scale disaster training exercise, but the likelihood of anything flying around below 2,500 feet over Forest Gate at 4am must have been rated as somewhere between infinitesimal and zero.
It makes sense as part of a large-scale exercise to have ‘contingency plans to evacuate more than 600 houses within 200 metres’, as reported by the BBC33, and to mobilize enough officers to take care of that. But if, after weeks of surveillance, you really are confident that there is a serious risk of nuclear, radiological, biological or chemical contamination, surely you try to evacuate the adjacent terrace houses, at the very least, before you wade in in your CBRN protection suits and potentially trigger the explosion you are suited-up against?
The absence of clear answers to such questions opened the way for the speculation the IPCC subsequently decried. Where the politics of the raid were concerned, the Socialist Equality Party (Britain) picked up the ball the government had so clumsily dropped and ran with it in an article titled ‘Britain: Lessons of the Forest Gate anti-terror raid’:
The government clearly believed something relatively unthreatening would be found, and wanted it to be the occasion for a high-profile and successful anti-terror raid. Not only would this vindicate the general ‘war on terror’ rhetoric, but it would also detract from very real and growing political difficulties facing the government.34
These difficulties were identified, in particular, as being media attacks on the Home Office for being ‘soft on law and order’ and anxieties about ‘the imminent release of a report into the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian gunned down by police on the London subway last July.’ It was suggested that the raid was mounted in an attempt to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Home Office’s role in the ‘war on terror.’ The article concluded with a mordant critique of the mainstream media’s role as ‘an apologist for the government’s offensive against democratic rights and a conduit for its propaganda.’
Having so spectacularly failed to find the explosive device they had invaded 46 and 48 Lansdown Road mob-handed to search for, and having in the process accidentally shot one of the men they had come to arrest, face needed to be saved somehow. If you can’t pin terrorism on someone you want to discredit, the next best thing is to try to pin child pornography on him. On August 3rd 2006, within a few hours of the publication of the IPCC’s report exonerating the police of any blame for his shooting during the raid, Abdul Kahar was arrested on charges of making and possessing images of child sex abuse. It would be stretching credibility to suggest that the timing of Adbul Kahar’s second arrest – two months after the IT equipment confiscated during the raid came into the possession of the police – was coincidental.35
Nearly three months later the CPS declined to bring charges against Abdul Kahar for something he had ‘strenuously denied’ all along. The main reason for not prosecuting him was that a substantial number of the images were found to have been transferred to his mobile phone. A CPS spokesperson commented: ‘To transfer to the phone, the suspect would have to have specialist knowledge. There was no evidence that Mr Abdulkahar had possession of, or access to, equipment or the technical knowledge to do so.’36
Abdul Kahar didn’t have the necessary equipment or expertise, but somebody else obviously did. Whoever it was had not only the specialist knowledge and the technical equipment but also nearly three months in which to transfer the images. In the circumstances, Abdul Kahar’s family’s response to the CPS announcement could justifiably have been a good deal more forceful than their mild comment that Abdul Kahar had been ‘first shot and then very publicly accused of things he knew nothing of and of which he was completely innocent.’37
In case the child pornography slur can’t be made to stick, benefit fraud is a good option to fall back on. The Evening Standard’s October 2nd report on the cost of the raid concluded its analysis by saying, firstly, that ‘Kahar is currently on police bail after being arrested in August over allegations that child pornography had been found on a computer seized during the raid’ and, secondly, that ‘Scotland Yard is also probing whether a substantial quantity of cash found during the Forest Gate is linked to criminality or benefit fraud.’ In the absence of any reports to the contrary, one can only assume that the ‘benefit fraud’ inquiry had as little substance as the child pornography accusations. As little substance, for that matter, as the original claim that a chemical bomb was to be found.38
Notes
* * *
1This account of what happened at 48 Lansdown Rd on 2nd June 2006 draws on Audrey Gillan and Hugh Muir’s report in The Guardian, 5/06/06 http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/05/terrorism.world
2Deborah Glass, IPCC, IPCC Independent Investigations into Complaints Made Following the Forest Gate Counter-Terrorist Operation on 2 June 2006, February 2007, https://www.ipcc.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Documents/investigation_commissioner_reports/forest_gate_2_3report.pdf
3Sophie Goodchild and Francis Elliott, Independent on Sunday, 11/6/06 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tipoff-by-police-informer-led-to-forest-gate-ra
id-756024.html
4Deborah Glass, IPCC, IPCC Independent Investigation into the Shooting of Muhammad Abdulkahar in 46 Lansdown Road, Forest Gate on Friday 2 June 2006, 3/8/2007 http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Documents/investigation_commissioner_reports/report.pdf
5Ibid.
6IPCC, 2007
7IPCC, 2007
8Julie Hyland, ‘Did police shoot to kill in Forest Gate anti-terror raid?’ World Socialist Website: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/06/raid-j15.html, 15/6/06,
9‘Police criticised for terror raid, BBC News, 13/2/ 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6356931.stm
10James Sturcke, ‘Man shot in anti-terror swoop’, 2/6/06 http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/02/terrorism.world
11Jamie Doward, Mark Townsend and Antony Barnett, The Observer, 11/6/2006, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/11/terrorism.world
12Independent, 13/2/07, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-must-apologise-to-terror-raid-families-436242.html
13BBC, ‘Police criticised for terror raid’, 13/2/07, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6356931.stm
14Ibid.
15BBC, ‘Don’t inhibit police, Blair says’, 14/6/06, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5079696.stm
16Ben Taylor, ‘Top cop’s new gaffe over Forest Gate raid’, 30/6/06, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/article-393386/Top-cops-new-gaffe-Forest-Gate-raid.html
17Evening Standard, ‘Bungled Islamic terror raid cost a staggering £2.2 million’, 2/10/06, http://www.standard.co.uk/news/bungled-islamic-terror-raid-cost-a-staggering-22-million-7215768.html
18Ibid.
19Sophie Goodchild and Francis Elliott, Independent on Sunday
20James Sturke, Guardian
21Sophie Goodchild and Francis Elliott, Independent on Sunday
22Jamie Doward, Mark Townsend and Antony Barnett, The Observer
23Susan Boniface, ‘Man with an IQ of just 69 is believed to be the trigger behind the bungled terror raid in Forest Gate, East London’, Sunday Mirror Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge,18/6/06, http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/ 06/18/ 1685652.htm
24Dan Bloom, ‘Racist thugs jailed for 36 years for battering two men almost to death with baseball bats because they weren’t Muslim’, 3/7/14, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2679587/Racist-thugs-jailed-battering-two-men-death-baseball-bats-werent-Muslim.html
25‘Terror raid intelligence denial’, BBC, 24/6/06, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5112388.stm
26Sunday Mirror, 18/6/06
27BBC, 24/6/06
28Sunday Mirror, 18/6/06
29The Observer, 11/6/06
30Richard Littlejohn, ‘The real intelligence failure of forest gate’, 9/6/06, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-389845/The-span-class-underline-real-span-intelligence-failure-forest-gate.html
31Ben Taylor, Daily Mail, 30/6/06
32BBC, ‘Forest Gate terror raid cost £2m’, 3/10/06, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5401386.stm
33Ibid.
34Socialist Equality Party (Britain), ‘Britain: Lessons of the Forest Gate anti-terror raid’, 13/6/06, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/06/terr-j13.html
35Vikram Dodd, ‘Forest Gate victim held on child porn charges’, 3/8/06, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/aug/04/terrorism.world
36BBC, ‘No charges for Forest Gate victim’, 27/10/06, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6092624.stm
37Ibid.
38Evening Standard, ‘Bungled Islamic terror raid cost a staggering £2.2 million’, 2/10/06
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