Burka-clad wife probed over support for IS killers
Claiming £25,000 benefits and laughing at Britain for 20 years...
THE wife of Anjem Choudary is being investigated by police after being caught on camera leading a secretive group of women supporting Islamic State.
Rubana Akhtar, 42, who is the leader of the female wing of Choudary’s banned terror group, Al-Muhajiroun, is likely to be quizzed by Scotland Yard over the clandestine meetings.
She was filmed promoting IS and her abhorrent views about ‘filthy Jews’.
Detectives have searched a number of addresses in east London associated with Akhtar and her female followers after the mother of five was revealed to be holding secret ‘study groups’ to recruit impressionable young Muslim mothers.
She was filmed by an undercover reporter for Channel 4’s Dispatches who spent a year infiltrating her group.
Akhtar, who called herself Umm Luqman, was recorded praising the birth of IS as a true Islamic caliphate, saying the ‘good days have already begun’.
As children ran around the room, she accused ‘filthy Jews’ of ‘audacity and arrogance’ and of encouraging the ‘killing of Muslim children and Muslim women’.
At the time the programme was broadcast on November 23 last year, Akhtar was not named for fear of prejudicing her
‘I would consider them extremist’
husband’s trial. But it can now be revealed that weeks earlier, Choudary tried to use his wife to get out of jail.
He claimed she was so sick with cancer that he needed bail to care for her because she was too frail to manage simple domestic tasks. However she was filmed delivering two-hour lectures in east London.
At bail hearings in August and September last year, Choudary told Westminster Magistrates’ Court: ‘I am a family man. I am 48. I have five children. I have a dear mother that I care for, I am her primary carer. My wife as well is quite sick. She has difficulty doing the housework.’
He claimed she was suffering from cancer, struggling to recover from an operation to remove a kidney and unable to cope with the demands of family life.
But Alison Morgan, prosecuting Choudary, said: ‘Far from being someone burdened by effects of cancer, she was pictured among a group of women who were espousing views in support of IS and Hidra – the concept of migration to the Islamic State.’
Akhtar has played a key role in Choudary’s circle, joining AlMuhajiroun in 2003 straight out of university.
They married in 1996 and later moved into a house in east London owned by her father. Choudary claimed housing benefit to pay the £1,300 monthly rent.
She was first identified as an IS supporter through Twitter, and then at a demonstration outside Regent’s Park Mosque in central London and at an Islamic stall in Lewisham, south London. During his trial it emerged that Akhtar was racking up £100 phone bills trying to convert others to the cause.
Akhtar encouraged Choudary to sign an oath of allegiance to IS’s caliphate. When he told her he would, she sent a message with a smiley face that read: ‘Allahu Akbar. I’m so happy.’
Counter-terrorism experts have described her as a ‘dangerous’ extremist who may have played a key role in persuading the 100 women who have gone out to join Isis since June 2014.
Nazir Afzal, former chief prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, said of her lectures: ‘She does more than support them, she’s saying that the socalled Islamic State is the caliphate and by supporting them, she is potentially committing a criminal offence.
‘It’s extremely dangerous.’ On hearing her anti-Semitic rant he added: ‘You can’t use language like that in the street because you’d be guilty of a religiously aggravated crime.’
Hannah Stuart, a counterextremism expert at the Henry Jackson Society think-tank, said of Akhtar’s group: ‘I would certainly consider them extremist. I think it is very dangerous.’
A Met Police spokesman said: ‘We are aware of the documentary. The Met’s Counter-terrorism Command executed search warrants at addresses in east London in relation to these inquiries. There have been no arrests. Inquiries are ongoing.’
He refused to condemn Lee Rigby’s killers
Sharia Project, and, most recently, Islam4UK. Material circulated via a link on Twitter included a guide on what ‘to do in the first 24 hours after establishing an the Islamic state’ in Britain and elsewhere.
The booklet declared that the Ministry of Defence would be replaced by the ‘War Department’ and specified roles for different divisions of the army.
‘Sports training of Western style will be abandoned to be replace [sic] by military training in the use of arms and warfare techniques,’ the pamphlet revealed, and a ‘Department of Internal Security’ would ‘collect information about the enemies’ and ‘monitor the activity of foreign residents’.
There would even be a special police squad to ‘supervise people travelling on public transport’.
Such a society already exists in Raqqa, the de facto capital of IScontrolled territory in Syria. ‘I would love to live under the Sharia,’ Choudary insisted in a recent interview. ‘I would take my wife and children to parts of Iraq and Syria to experience the Sharia.’
Why didn’t he, then? He gave his reason – or rather, excuses – at his trial. Choudary told the judge he could not leave the country because he was he was his mother’s carer, had five children, all at different schools, one of whom suffered from OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder], and his wife had recently been diagnosed with cancer.’
He was also needed here, for other reasons, Choudary said.
‘If you are in a country like Britain propagating Islam, and if you left, you would leave behind a vacuum, you could be obliged to stay if no one was left to fill it.’
There was a theory that, until now, at least, Choudary was allowed to continue his activities with impunity because he was regarded by the police and intelligence agencies as someone who could flush out dangerous Islamic extremists. As he was under constant surveillance, so the argument went, those likely to present a threat could be flagged up and monitored more easily than if his network were driven underground. If that was the case, it has proved to be dangerously counter-productive.
Choudary and his followers have been linked to string of plots to attack Britain, it emerged at the Old Bailey. Scotland Yard, meanwhile, has reportedly spent in excess of £1million policing rallies led by him.
This policy of apparent appeasement has resulted in growing disenchantment among the public. No more so than in the wake of the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, hacked to death outside his barracks in Woolwich in 2013. Footage later surfaced of Choudary, megaphone in hand, standing side by side with one of the killers, Michael Adebolajo, at a demonstration in Central London in 2007. In the wake of the killing, Choudary described Adebolajo as a young man ‘of impeccable character’.
Choudary was subsequently given star billing on the BBC’s Newsnight, where he refused to condemn Adebolajo or his accomplice, implying the atrocity was the consequence of British prejudice and racism towards young Muslims.
‘There are,’ Choudary once declared, ‘three types of Muslims: those in prison, those of us on our way [to prison], and non-practising Muslims … I live under the expectation that I could be taken to prison at any time.’
In fact, it has taken nearly two decades to bring Anjem Choudary to justice. Until now, he had chalked up only two minor convictions: for holding a protest without due notice in 2006 and for using an insurance document with intent to deceive and using a vehicle without insurance in 2004. He was fined for both offences. Choudary has run up a huge bill for legal aid – footed by the taxpayer – since his arrest in September 2014. He tried, for example, to get his case thrown out by the Supreme Court, claiming that his right to free speech under human rights legislation had been trampled on.
During his various court appearances, he displayed the same swaggering arrogance – and hypocrisy – he had shown throughout his ‘career’. On one occasion he refused to give out his address, berated officials for not giving him a pen in the dock and refused to stand when the judge entered, demanding to know why there was ‘a reason for me to stand’.
Outside Southwark police station in South London, when he was first bailed, he told the TV cameras: ‘I don’t think they have got anything on me. They are thinking, “Well, maybe we’ll keep him and when he comes back we’ll stick something on him like an Asbo”.
‘If people have strong views why should they be curtailed? If you believe in freedom of expression why should they be curtailed? When the Government first got into power they said they were going to deal with terrorism and the people who provided the justification for terrorism – which means what? The Government talks about British values – but what are they? Fish and chips? God Save the Queen? One of the 7/7 bombers worked in a chippie.’