Bin Laden spokesman returns to U.K.
LONDON • Osama bin Laden’s former spokesman is free to walk Britain’s streets with no official restrictions as sources branded him an “old and obese busted flush” following his release from a U.S. prison.
Adel Abdel Bary, 60, was flown back to the U.K. Friday after spending 21 years in prison over his involvement in the al- Qaida bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 224 people were killed.
Bary is understood to have been reunited with his wife, who lives in a council flat, worth as much as pounds 750,000, in Maida Vale, northwest London.
He is free to roam the streets without any formal restrictions, such as electronic tagging and curfews, which normally apply to freed terrorists, because the sentence was served in the U.S.
But sources insisted he posed little risk after so many years in detention without contact with senior leadership in Islamist terror networks.
Bary, who was born in Egypt, is also thought to offer little physical threat because he is severely overweight - one reason why U.S. authorities ordered his deportation due to the serious threat to his life if he caught COVID-19 in prison.
“Bari is very much a busted flush,” said a well-placed source, “He is pretty old and pretty obese and has been in prison for a very long time. How credible his contacts are remains to be seen but having spent so many years behind bars, his contacts book has dried up.”
John Hayes, a Tory MP on the intelligence and security committee and a former security minister, said: “It is a great shame we cannot deport him back to Egypt. The fewer of these kinds of people we have in this country the better.”
MI6 and counter-terrorism police are reviewing his resettlement. He is likely to be subjected to electronic surveillance to monitor his communications.
Bary was arrested in 1999 by Scotland Yard detectives after U.S. embassy bombings the year before in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam signalled al- Qaida’s emergence on to the world stage.
A 13-year extradition battle followed, leading to his removal to the States in 2012. Bary entered a plea bargain in 2015 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison but has been released after he spent 16 years incarcerated awaiting trial.
An agreement was struck during the extradition process that the U.K. would take him back once his U.S. sentence was served. Bary cannot be sent back to his home country because of the risk of torture in breach of his human rights.
A Home Office source said: “We had no option but to take him back.”
The Home Office said a “range of powers” was being used to monitor Bary. A spokesman added: “The U.S. and the U.K. are complying with previous assurances to secure his extradition to the U.S. to face justice.”
Bary applied for political asylum in the U.K. in 1991 after fleeing Egypt where he was tortured as an opposition lawyer so severely that he was left with physical scars and mental ill health.
He secured asylum in March 1993 and was granted indefinite leave to remain in 1997. He brought his wife and three children to the U.K. in 1993, and had three more children in this country. One of his children, Abdel-majed Abdel Bary, 28, travelled to Syria to fight with IS and was photographed holding up the head of an executed prisoner.