Cleric Linked to Al Qaeda Jailed

British police have arrested Abu Qatada, a Muslim cleric whose angry sermons and alleged ties to terrorists across Europe and beyond made him one of the most revered and most wanted figures in Al Qaeda, authorities said Friday.

The arrest took place Wednesday at a public housing project in south London, according to authorities and the fugitive’s friends. The cleric, whose real name is Omar Mahmoud Othman, dropped out of sight mysteriously in December as police were about to arrest him under an anti-terrorism law passed in response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Police said nothing Friday about his whereabouts during the subsequent 10 months or the circumstances of the arrest.

It was a strange denouement for a strange case. Senior law enforcement officials in other European nations had criticized the British government for failing to arrest Abu Qatada sooner. In recent months some European investigators speculated that British intelligence agents had taken him into protective custody as an informant.

But there was little dispute Friday about the importance of the catch.

“I think it’s very significant: He is on the FBI most-wanted list, he’s wanted [in] France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Belgium for a variety of terrorist conspiracies,” said Andrew Dismore, a parliamentary deputy. “He really is one of the spiders at the very center of the web.”

Abu Qatada’s stature in Europe rivals that of Osama bin Laden and helped establish London as the hub of Al Qaeda activity outside Afghanistan, European investigators said.

Videocassettes of his sermons turned up in the Hamburg, Germany, apartment of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Would-be holy warriors flocked to his Islamic center on Baker Street in London, where extremists including Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui, now facing trial in the United States in connection with Sept. 11, were allegedly radicalized.

Spanish police call the Palestinian-born Abu Qatada a “godfather” of a multiethnic federation of terrorism. He had close ties to a Tunisian-dominated network in France and Belgium accused in the assassination of anti-Taliban guerrilla chief Ahmed Shah Masoud in Afghanistan; a Syrian group suspected of helping Sept. 11 suspects in Germany and Spain; and an Algerian cell dismantled as it prepared a Christmas attack on a cathedral in Strasbourg, France, in 2000, according to investigators and court documents.

“He was undoubtedly a top ideological leader,” a Spanish police official said Friday. “And we believe he was operationally very important as well. Now the case against him on the second point must be built. There are questions to answer.”

Among them are how the cleric was able to remain at large for so long and what led to his capture.

Two Islamic leaders who know Abu Qatada said he was captured after his wife and children visited him at an apartment in a housing project in south London across the River Thames from Parliament. After the cleric’s family had been with him four or five days, British investigators intercepted a mobile-phone call by his wife and pinpointed the hide-out, according to Omar Bakri of Al Muhajiron, a prominent London extremist group.

Another leader of Al Muhajiron, Anjem Choudary, said that Abu Qatada had remained active while underground, communicating about scholarly topics and imparting “Islamic guidance” over the Internet. Choudary insisted that Abu Qatada simply managed to outwit his pursuers for 10 months.

“Abu Qatada is a very shrewd man,” Choudary said. “There are many people who could help him, and he could probably mingle with the crowd without standing out. They were most probably monitoring his wife and she let her guard slip.”

A different theory circulated among European law enforcement officials and terrorism experts: that Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service knew Abu Qatada’s location but decided that it was valuable to keep him under surveillance. Their goal might have been to monitor his communications and contacts and gather information about suspected terrorists driven into the shadows by a post-Sept. 11 crackdown, experts said.

“I have a sneaking suspicion [authorities] knew where he was,” said Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland. “A lot of people underestimate the capability of MI5 and what they have achieved in the anti-terror war. They operate below the visual radar.”

It is a trademark of elite counter-terrorism services in Britain, France, Spain and Italy to conduct in-depth surveillance of prominent suspects for as long as possible before detaining them.

A spokesperson at London’s Belmarsh Prison confirmed only that Abu Qatada was arrested under the Terrorism Act and was being held under heavy security.

Last week, Britain’s top law enforcement official, Home Secretary David Blunkett, told reporters that he did not know where the fugitive cleric was.

The tough law under which Abu Qatada was arrested was designed to rein in Abu Qatada and others who allegedly used Islamic intellectual activism to camouflage senior roles in the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Especially because Al Qaeda has a limited hierarchy, the cleric stood out as a dominant figure, experts say. A French police intelligence report written in March 2001 described him as a “theoretician of jihad.”

Investigators in several European countries allege that he ran the human pipeline funneling recruits back and forth between London and Afghan training camps and Islamic battle theaters. They also accuse him of helping to finance and direct terrorist plots in cahoots with Bin Laden’s brain trust in Afghanistan.

Abu Qatada was born in Bethlehem in 1960 and moved to Jordan. He arrived in Britain in 1993 and received political asylum. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in Jordan in absentia for his alleged involvement in terrorist attacks. But he cannot be deported because Jordan has a death penalty and Britain does not extradite suspects to countries that have capital punishment.

In the mid-1990s, he was active in the London leadership of the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, which waged a bloody struggle against the Algerian government and carried out attacks in France, according to Italian and French court documents. He was the editor of GIA’s newspaper and played a role in absorbing Algerian terrorists into Al Qaeda, which was then an evolving alliance of extremist networks, according to the French intelligence report.

This week’s arrest was not his first. He was arrested by British police in February 2001 during a follow-up investigation of the alleged Strasbourg plot, but he was soon released, according to Italian court documents.

After Sept. 11, the U.S. placed him on a list of suspects who allegedly provided material support for acts of terrorism. Britain froze his assets.

Abu Qatada has denied any role in violence, describing himself as a man of faith and ideas. British officials must now assess their case against him while anticipating extradition requests from half a dozen other countries eager to prosecute him.

“This is a sticky dilemma for the British government,” Ranstorp said.

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Correspondent Bruce Wallace in London contributed to this report.