Bomber used taxpayer cash to fund Isil cell
A BRITISH terror cell may have been funded by the taxpayer after the wife of an Isil suicide bomber confirmed he had used a government handout to fund his extremist activities.
Leaked documents from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) show that Jamal al-Harith, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who blew himself up in Mosul, Iraq, earlier this week, had links to a Manchester-based jihadist who is believed to have recruited dozens of Britons to the terrorist group.
Yesterday in Parliament ministers pledged to claw back funds from a £20 million compensation pot handed to 17 British former Guantanamo detainees, if any have breached the conditions of their payouts by diverting cash to terrorists.
Lord Carlile QC, the former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, said there was a “possibility that al-Harith funded a cell to travel to Syria”, and called for an urgent investigation into connections between the suicide bomber and other jihadists.
Al-Harith, who was born in Manchester, is thought to have received as much as £1 million after being released from the US detention camp in 2004. The leaked documents show that the 50-year-old suicide bomber was recommended to the terrorist group by Raphael Hostey, a 24year-old Manchester jihadist who is thought to have encouraged dozens of his countrymen to join Isil before he was killed in a drone strike last May.
Hostey is known to have travelled to Syria to join Isil with close friends Mohammad Azzam Javeed and Anil Khalil Raoufi, in October 2013, but all three are now thought to be dead.
In Syria they met up with notorious jihadist Iftikhar Jaman, from Portsmouth, one of four young men
from the city who were later killed in fighting.
Shukee Begum, al-Harith’s wife, told Channel 4 News last night that her husband received “substantially less” than £1 million. Confirming her husband’s links to Hostey, she said she believed al-Harith had “not much money left”, but had used a portion of the taxpayerfunded payout to pay for his extremist activities, including his travel to Syria.
Terrorism experts called for an investigation into whether al-Harith, born Ronald Fiddler, had also used the cash to fund other extremists.
Lord Carlile, who has condemned the payments made to the Guantanamo detainees, said: “It would be of concern if it was found that al-Harith’s money funded other terrorists. We are entitled to know what checks were made on his money and how he was spending it.
“The question now is: did he fund any other terrorists. There will be very important lessons to learn in the future. It raises the possibility that al- Harith funded a cell to travel to Syria.”
Kyle Orton, a Middle East analyst at the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank, said: “Fiddler’s death while fighting for the Islamic State underlines the concerns – raised at the time – about compensation money being used for terrorism and the lack of a mechanism to prevent this. Where this money went is especially troubling given Fiddler’s connections to British IS operatives who later helped gather Western recruits for IS and direct attacks within the West.” According to leaked Isil documents, Hostey, who used the nom de guerre Abu Qaqa al-Britani, played a key role in persuading and facilitating others to join the terrorist group.