The Finsbury Park connection
ONE of the Kouachi brothers was mentored by a terrorist linked to London’s notorious Finsbury Park mosque.
The revelation will raise concerns about British links to Wednesday’s atrocity in France.
Cherif Kouachi, 32, met Djamel Beghal, 50, who was once accused of being Osama bin Laden’s main European recruiter, while in prison in Paris.
He maintained his links with the Al Qaeda lynchpin after being released from jail. Kouachi was secretly photographed by French intelligence officers meeting Beghal while he was under house arrest in Murat in central France in April 2010.
Also present were two other convicted terror- ists, jihadi recruiter Ahmed Laidouni and Algerian Armed Islamic Group member Farid Melouk.
Beghal attended hate cleric Abu Qatada’s prayer meetings in London, and is also said to have been a ‘constant presence’ at the Finsbury Park mosque in the late 1990s, when it was Abu Hamza’s base.
He allegedly recruited the shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the ‘20th hijacker’ in the 9/11 attacks, at the London mosque.
Beghal, who also had links to Leicester, is said to have met one of Osama bin Laden’s key deputies at the former Al Qaeda leader’s base in Afghanistan. He spent ten years in prison in France for planning attacks and was only released in 2010. Reda Hassaine, who worked as a paid MI5 informant inside the Finsbury Park mosque in the late 1990s and early 2000s, said Beghal was a well-known figure there in this period. He added that Beghal had connections to both Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza.
‘Their warped view of the world has filtered down through him to a new generation,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘What happened in Paris was the legacy of Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza.
‘A completely new generation, who never met these people in London, have learned their ideology indirectly and are now willing to die in jihad.’