Police hunting a runaway terror suspect swooped on a mosque in West London and nabbed… a tabloid newspaper reporter.
The journalist had been distributing posters in the area around the mosque where Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed dodged the long arm of the law by donning a burka, offering a reward for the 27-year-old Somali-born Briton’s arrest.
A mob soon gathered and someone complained to Plod.
Uniformed officers arrived and took the reporter and his photographer to Acton police station on suspicion of “racially aggravated public disorder”.
The pair were quizzed under caution by detectives for four hours before being released.
Police say their investigation is “continuing” and charges could still follow.
It seems to be open season on journos right now.
They’re so much easier to nick than fanatical al-Qaeda-trained jihadists, aren’t they? For one thing, they don’t cunningly disguise themselves in burkas.
This whole fiasco began when three terror suspects, including Mohamed, who were accused of tampering with their supposedly state-of-the-art monitoring tags, walked free from court after lawyers successfully argued their electronic tags were faulty.
Mohamed was said to have damaged his tag accidentally while kneeling down to pray five times a day.
After he was freed, Mohamed – who has been linked to al-Shabaab, the terrorist gang behind the Kenyan shopping mall massacre – walked in to the An-Noor Masjid Mosque and Community Centre in Acton.
CCTV footage showed him wearing his everyday clothes.
When he left the building a few hours later, he was wrapped in an Islamic woman’s burka.
Careful! Distributing this photo is "racially aggravated public disorder"The Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, MI5 and the UK Border Agency have now joined forces to find him.
But last night, Mohamed was still at large.
I’m not surprised. In the current climate, where the police tiptoe around, terrified of infringing anyone’s human rights, it’s a brave copper who suspects somebody lumbering down the street in a burka might actually be a man and asks her/him to take it off – if you don’t mind, madam/sir.
Who’s to blame for this ludicrous state of affairs?
Home Secretary Theresa May ultimately carries the can.
But the finger is being pointed at Deputy PM Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems, forever sucking up to the civil liberties brigade, who persuaded the Coalition government to scrap Labour’s controversial “control orders” which allowed fanatics – including Mohamed, as it happens – to be placed under virtual house arrest.
These have been superseded by the wishy-washy Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures, alias T-Pims – which sound like some kind of trendy cocktails.
Judging by what’s happening now, they should be called out-of-control orders.
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