Egyptian Gets Cold Shoulder in Britain

Each time he trims his beard, Egyptian cleric Hani Sebai says, he remembers how interrogators burned it after he was picked up by security services in Cairo nearly a quarter of a century ago.

After several rounds of detentions, he fled the country with his family. “I knew from the beginning that London was going to be my destination,” he said. “I knew the British were famous for defending human rights. We had a very rosy picture of London as a city where the oppressed could find protection.”

So many foreign Islamist dissidents came to the same conclusion that the British capital earned a new nickname: Londonistan. But in the wake of the July bombings here, the most vocal -- some would say vitriolic -- of them may have worn out their welcome.

Last month, British Home Secretary Charles Clarke announced that the government would deport any non-Briton seen as fomenting or justifying terrorist violence. Sebai, the director of London’s Al Maqrizi Center for Historical Studies, now finds himself the target of calls by the British tabloids to ship him back to Egypt. He has been accused of describing the July 7 attacks that killed 52 commuters as “a great victory that rubbed the noses of G-8 countries in the mud.”

Although he did use words in Arabic roughly to that effect on an Al Jazeera talk show, he insists that he was speaking as an analyst describing how the Al Qaeda terrorist network would have viewed the attack, and wasn’t expressing his personal views.

“I didn’t defend Al Qaeda,” he said from his home in Hammersmith, an ethnically mixed West London neighborhood. “I don’t justify any of [Al Qaeda’s] actions. I never incited anyone to kill innocent civilians, and I never blessed the operations that happened here in London.”

Nevertheless, his remarks, which ricocheted around the globe on the Internet, provided proof to many commentators that Britain’s stance toward the Islamist exiles in its midst was out of whack. As Harvard University history professor Niall Ferguson wrote last month in the Telegraph newspaper, citing Sebai and another Muslim cleric, “A pernicious ideology has been allowed to infiltrate Europe’s immigrant communities. And that has happened because we have blindly allowed our country to be a haven for fanatics.”

The Egyptian government long has called on British authorities to extradite Sebai, saying he was a leading member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant group linked to Al Qaeda. A military tribunal in Cairo gave him a life sentence in 1999 for his alleged involvement in a plot to attack the U.S. Embassy in Albania.

Sebai, 46, refuses to speak to non-Arab reporters. As Al Jazeera flickered in the background, he was giving his first interview to a Western media outlet when news bulletins of the failed July 21 bombings flashed on the screen.

“What a black day,” he said quietly. “These guys are stupid. I could have been on that train, or any of my kids. This is not helping the Islamic cause in any sense.”

On his website, www.almaqreze.com, Sebai posts theological studies, articles, poetry and statements critical of Arab governments and the United States. The website also has posted statements of Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant who heads Al Qaeda in Iraq. On the site, Bin Laden has been described as one of the “lions” carrying the banner of jihad in the Arab peninsula.

But in his interview with The Times, Sebai distanced himself from Al Qaeda’s operations, including the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that they were “Islamically unjustifiable, since they targeted Western civilians who were not involved in the war efforts against Muslims.”

“There is a difference between respecting someone as an individual and endorsing their views,” said Sebai, whose Friday sermons at the Warwick Community Center in London attract a sizable number of worshipers. “You can admire Che Guevara, but you don’t have to necessarily be a Communist.”

The Egyptian dissident arrived in Britain on May 6, 1994, on a Sudanese airliner. After leaving Egypt, he stayed for one week at a hotel in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, with his family before taking off to seek asylum in London.

“Up until the late 1990s, any Islamist could have bought a ticket to London, hopped on a plane and applied successfully for asylum upon arrival in Britain,” said Mohammed Salah, an Egyptian journalist who covers militant groups in Cairo for the London-based pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat.

Tensions were running high in Egypt then, with the outbreak of the Islamist insurgency against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. The armed campaign was mainly launched by the militant Gamaa al Islamiya, which targeted police, as well as foreign tourists in an effort to cripple the country’s economy. Islamic Jihad limited its attacks to government officials.

Egyptian authorities detained Islamist suspects, and security forces killed some. Local and international rights watchdogs reported widespread abuses against suspects and their families at the hands of State Security police, the Egyptian counterpart of the FBI.

“I left Egypt in fear,” Sebai said. Torture “was happening on a mass scale in the 1990s, and I feared for my personal safety. I was defending suspects in courts as a lawyer. But then I stopped going to court and went into hiding because I thought I would be arrested at anytime, even in court.”

Sebai said the arrest of a colleague, Abdel Hareth Madani, a prominent Islamist lawyer, was the last straw. “I was so scared something like what happened to Madani would happen to me,” he said. On the day he arrived in London, Sebai said, Madani’s family was notified that he had died in custody.

Mohammed Hashem, an Islamist lawyer in Cairo and a former member of Gamaa al Islamiya, remembers Sebai as a prominent activist with strong “ideological” ties to Islamic Jihad before he left Cairo. But he insisted that Sebai “never took part in any violent actions, though he was radically critical of the Egyptian regime in his writings and speeches.... The Jihad wasn’t involved in much military activities, anyway, at the time.”

Sebai denies ever being a member of Islamic Jihad. He also argues that, in any case, most members disagreed with the decision of the group’s leader, Ayman Zawahiri, to align himself with Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, a move that Sebai said destroyed Islamic Jihad. Today, Zawahiri acts as Bin Laden’s lieutenant and spokesman.

Four years after his arrival in Britain, Sebai was arrested in the wake of the Al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He was detained with three other Egyptian Islamists, mainly on immigration charges but also on grounds they were deemed a “threat to public security,” Sebai said. “But [the Home Office] didn’t have anything on me.”

Sebai spent four months in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison on security and immigration charges. He was transferred to Rochester detention center in nearby Kent after he waged a 28-day hunger strike.

“During that time, there was a marathon attempt to return me to Egypt,” Sebai recalled. While he was in Belmarsh, an Egyptian military prosecutor accused Sebai of involvement in a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, the Albanian capital. According to the Egyptian government, an Islamic Jihad cell in Tirana was planning to attack the embassy, a scheme that involved extremists in Eastern Europe, Britain and Yemen.

The CIA spirited away five Egyptian Jihad suspects in Albania and Bulgaria and turned them over to Cairo. In Egypt, the suspects’ lawyers said, the five were tortured. Two were executed. An Egyptian military court gave Sebai a life sentence in absentia, alleging he was an Islamic Jihad “media spokesperson.”

“I never went to Albania and never returned from it,” said Sebai, scoffing at the Egyptian government allegations. “At that time, I didn’t even know where Albania was. The accusations ... were fabrications.”

His lawyer in Cairo, Mamdouh Ismail, a former member of Islamic Jihad, also insisted that the “case was bogus.”

“There were no plots by Islamic Jihad to attack the Americans at that time,” Ismail said in a telephone interview. “The Egyptian government wanted to make up a case and indict Egyptian exiles so as to be able to extradite them.”

Sebai’s extradition to Egypt was negotiated, but in the end, Britain refused to hand him over.

In a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair dated July 8, 1999, then-Home Secretary Jack Straw insisted on releasing Sebai and three other Egyptian suspects, citing “no grounds to continue their detention” and expressing doubts on any guarantees Cairo might give regarding the treatment of detainees, Al Hayat reported.

The question now is whether, in the wake of the London bombings, the British government will insist on getting the same guarantees regarding the treatment of prisoners extradited to their home countries.

Bin Laden’s appeal, Sebai said, is similar to that held by bandits in Arabic folklore: They defy tyrannical governments.

Radicalization of British Muslims is a result of U.S. and British foreign policy, not the presence of Arab Islamists in Britain, he asserted.

“You don’t need radical imams to radicalize today’s youth into jihad,” Sebai said. “The Internet has replaced the imam.”