War on Terror Alert: Files of British Muslim Students Given to US Agencies

Syma Mohammed and Robert Verkaik report in The Independent of London:

Personal information concerning the private lives of almost 1,000 British Muslim university students [at University College London] is to be shared with US intelligence agencies in the wake of the Detroit bomb scare.

The disclosure has outraged Muslim groups and students who are not involved in extremism but have been targeted by police and now fear that their names will appear on international terrorist watch lists. So far, the homes of more than 50 of the students have been visited by police officers, but nobody has been arrested. The case has raised concerns about how the police use the data of innocent people and calls into question the heavy-handed treatment of Muslim students by UK security agencies.


This week, MPs criticised the Government's key policies on countering extremism which they said were alienating Muslim communities.

Last year, The Independent reported on the alleged harassment of young Muslims by the police and security service, MI5, whose officers had tried to recruit them as spies. In the latest case, details of students from University College London (UCL) were handed over to police by the university's student union, after detectives visited the campus in early January 2010 during their continuing investigation into the attempted Christmas Day bombing in Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Abdulmutallab studied engineering at UCL in 2005-08, and was president of the UCL Islamic Society in 2006-07.

Police had first approached UCL's Islamic Society, which refused to hand over the information. Mojeed Adams-Mogaji, the society's president, said: "I was concerned about what they would do with the data. At another meeting with the Metropolitan Police, they told us they would keep it for seven years and would share the data with other intelligence agencies if requested. Obviously, I'm very concerned with what they plan to do with this information."

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Comments

[Dave]

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=61639

By the way - 4 presidents of London-based Islamic societies have faced terrorist charges in the last few years. Funny how that keeps happening!

[Dave]

"Personal information concerning the private lives of almost 1,000 British Muslim university students [at University College London] is to be shared with US intelligence agencies in the wake of the Detroit bomb scare."

******

UK universities have known of the struggles Muslim students have with the Western secular culture, but they don't do anything about it. When UCL was confronted about their student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (underwear bomber), they washed their hands of it saying he was a "polite" and "quiet" gentleman. It seems they haven't done anything about the radicalisation of Muslim on youth on that campus. I think it's good that intelligence agencies are doing something about it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/6917777/British-universities-seats-of-learning-and-loathing.html

From the article -- "What Abdulmutallab’s parents must be wondering is what happened to the college’s duty of care towards their son. Did no tutor talk to him about his life outside engineering? Did it concern no one that this lonely boy had taken to wearing Islamic dress? Wasn’t anyone worried about the radicalism of the “War on Terror Week” Abdulmutallab organised as president? Did anyone know he had asked a “hate-preacher” to address the society? Or did UCL think their job was simply to teach the boy engineering in exchange for his father’s large cheques?"