Terrorism & Security
posted June 12, 2006 at 11:50 a.m.

British police criticized over 'bungled' counterterrorism raid

Muslim groups protest 'rising Islamophobia' as government admits to erosion of community trust.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The Guardian reports that Prime Minister Tony Blair Monday gave his " unqualified backing" to London police chief Sir Ian Blair, who is facing growing pressure over his antiterror operations, including a bungled chemical-bomb raid in East London 10 days ago where one man was shot in the shoulder.

Reuters reported that Friday evening the police released two brothers they had arrested after admitting they had found no bomb in their apartment. More than 250 police officers took part in the raid. Muslim groups and a body that oversees policing said the police had made a "series of errors in the huge counter-terrorism raid."

Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain said police needed to acknowledge they had made errors in last week's raid to prevent extremist groups exploiting resentment in the Muslim community. "Some recognition that mistakes have been made would go some way towards the damage done," he told Reuters.
"Even at the height of the IRA bombing campaign in the 1970s we didn't see the police storming into innocent Irish people's homes on this kind of scale."

The Financial Times reports that the raid has raised question over how Britain is fighting the war on terror. The Times reports that the raid was approved by both government ministers and by other high-level officials. Officials in the government now fear the bungled raid has deeply damaged relations with Britain's large Muslim community.

[Government] and police sources admitted the raid on the east London house had returned community relations to the low point they were at before the July bombings in London, when there was a widespread perception among Muslims that they were being stigmatised by the government's anti-terror strategy.

Some senior police officers told the Financial Times they believed they were now facing a big challenge in trying to regain the support of moderate Muslim opinion and to prevent extremists exploiting the unease felt within the wider community.


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The Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday that the information on which the police carried out the raid (which said the brothers had a cyanide vest in their apartment) may have been given to them by " a disgruntled local man who has been involved with one of the brothers in the past." But the police continued to defend their actions in the raid.

"Just imagine the reaction if a chemical bomb had gone off and it had come out that we had known about it," said one MI5 officer. "We would have been crucified, and rightly so. We couldn't have taken that sort of chance with people's lives. It would be the most gross dereliction of our duty to the public if we did that."

In an editorial Sunday, The Observer supported this position, saying it was better "a bungled raid than another terrorist outrage."

But Simon Jenkins writing in The Sunday Times, argues that the constant government and police refrain of "better safe than sorry" requires the trust of the public in order to be validated, but that trust is now raidly eroding.

Hence the growing dissatisfaction of people and politicians with the performance of the public sector, despite it being not measurably worse in Britain than elsewhere. Sir Ian Blair, London's police chief, protests that he is "damned when I do and damned when I don't". He is damned when, as over Menezes [the young Brazilian shot to death in an underground station in London] and Forest Gate [the raid in East London], his force overreacts. He is damned when, as on July 7, security errs on the side of inaction. But in each case damnation results from a decline in trust. Purporting to be better safe than sorry, authority can no longer get away with sorry ...

There is no such thing as a risk-free society. Every community is awash in risks, and handling them is a sign of its maturity. Scaring people witless, as the present government too often does, not only involves crying wolf (as over smallpox, ricin and bird flu) but destroys faith in its judgment of priorities. Such is the hysteria surrounding Blair's war on terror that the Metropolitan police must deflect resources away from combating street crime towards counter-terrorism and VIP protection. As in Northern Ireland its heavy-handedness risks alienating precisely the communities on whose co-operation it depends for public safety.

In an editorial, Scotland's Sunday Herald supports the action the police took in carrying out the raid, but said their actions afterwards illustrate a much greater problem – the attempts by authorities to cover up a mistake rather than admit the truth.

No institution is perfect, no institution always gets it right. Our high demands of today's police to protect us from terrorists has almost built-in problems of accountability. But we have to expect one thing from the police: honesty.

The reality is that the police will not reveal everything; they would risk operational effectiveness if they did. But when there is a clear mistake, police leaders have to come clean and admit their error; admit that this time, they got it wrong. At Forest Gate they got it wrong. In the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes they got wrong. Yet on both occasions there were evident attempts to pretend otherwise.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Mark Stephens, a media lawyer of the law firm Finers Stephens Innocent, called the police action " an expensive mistake." Lawyers said the brothers could get as much as £200,000 ($360,800) each in libel damages for statements that police made about them after the raid. The brother who was shot in the shoulder could get an additional £30,000 ($55,200).