'You can feel a violent person when they speak...but no action was taken.' Brendan Montague Friday May 28, 2004 The Argus Mustafa Kamal came to Brighton to study. But it was behind the doors of a small mosque that he fomented his plans and began the transformation into the hate figure Abu Hamza. The Muslim community warned of the extremist in their midst but no-one took action. THE doors to the mosque were open when teenager Mustafa Kamal arrived, looking for somewhere to stay. Softly spoken and polite, the young student had nothing more than the clothes on his back and a few official papers stuffed into his pocket. It was late August 1981 and the Egyptian was on a BSc engineering course at Brighton Polytechnic while working as a bouncer at a nightclub in the West End. He was enjoying a "playboy lifestyle" when he reached a crisis point in his life and looked to Islam for answers. He had learned that the doors of the mosque in Dyke Road, Brighton, were always open. The red-brick detached house was nestled between two private homes opposite Brighton and Hove Sixth Form College. A small green plaque welcomed visitors to the Makki mosque and Muslim community centre. Inside, rows of shoes sat on shelves. Leaflets were scattered on sideboards and dusty religious books lined the walls. He was quickly taken under the wing of imam Dr Abduljalil Sajid. He was given a place to sleep and food in return for a little rent. There was a communal room where prayers were held five times each day. Mustafa worked through the night at the club but when he arrived back at the mosque he would read the Koran, carry out cleaning duties and go to his room. While in Brighton he married Valerie Fleming, receiving British citizenship. The couple split up just over a year later. Behind the doors of the mosque, he became obsessed with violent extremism and vowed to die on the battlefields of Afghanistan alongside Taliban and al Qaida fighters. The transformation into a "freelance consultant to terrorist groups worldwide", legendary for his metal hook arm and false eye, had begun. Abu Hamza Al Misri, as he is now known, is today held in the maximum security wing of Belmarsh prison in London. He faces extradition to the USA on 11 terrorism charges and potentially life imprisonment. The 46-year-old is accused of involvement in the taking of 16 westerners hostage in Yemen in December 1998. Three Britons were shot dead. He is also accused of setting up a training camp in Oregon to teach terrorists to use guns, antiaircraft weapons and suicide bombs to wage jihad in Afghanistan. He returned to Britain having lost both his arms, an injury he claims he sustained while clearing Russian landmines. He became notorious for his extremist preaching outside the Finsbury Park mosque in London before his arrest by Metropolitan Police at 3am on Thursday. The US prosecutor bringing the charges, Hugo Keith, said before Belmarsh magistrates: "Abu Hamza is a supporter and facilitator of terrorism. He has contacts with and has supplied material to terrorist organisations. "He has a contact with highranking terrorists in al Qaida and has promoted violence and antiWestern sentiment at Finsbury Park mosque. He has engaged in a pattern of terrorist activity since 1998." It was during Hamza's time in Brighton that his involvement with extremist groups from Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan first came to the fore and where his plans for jihad were formed. Dr Sajid, now chairman of the Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony, remembers the day he arrived. He said: "Our doors were open 24 hours a day when I was at the Dyke Road mosque. "Abu Hamza came with just the clothes he was wearing and had no suitcases. He did not even have books, just a few papers in his pocket and that was it. "He was looking for accommodation, a place to pray and live, and said he would pay the rent and do voluntary work. "He gave his student credentials and, as the director, I provided him with a room. "Abu Hamza wanted to work in the mosque and do all sorts of jobs. He did cleaning and a few other things. He had a visa problem and I sent him to an expert and got his visa sorted out." At first Dr Sajid became a father figure to the young disciple and gave him books and literature to study. He said: "He was learning. He had not been a student of Islam and was very humble. I did not find him violent. "Most of the time he was trying to get knowledge from original sources. I don't remember him ever being rude to me." The young student worked hard to gain a foundation in the religion. But he quickly became consumed by the more extreme elements of Islam. Still ignorant of the central tenets of the faith, he began preaching his own perverted ideology. Dr Sajid said: "When he roomed here he had no followers. He was not the leader type of person, he was learning. "He was working in a nightclub and living in a mosque, which is a contradiction in terms. He did not know what Islam is. "He was concerned about his own life, he was concerned he did not live a Muslim life. He was changing from a playboy lifestyle to a Muslim life and in my view he was going to extremism. "I gave him Islamic literature and I found out he was not educated. He was pretty Western but something triggered him to fight for his cause." Dr Sajid soon became alarmed by the young man's extreme views and support for terror organisations in Africa and the Middle East. The first confrontation between the two came when the imam found the teenager distributing leaflets supporting holy war and terror attacks abroad. He said: "I did not find anything wrong at first but when he started handing out extremist literature I found out his views were obnoxious and extreme. "He started to distribute information in Arabic and had the leaflets in the mosque. His views about changing governments included using violence. "He showed me one or two magazines from Algeria. The magazines were not right in my opinion. I asked him with whose permission he had brought this literature to the mosque and said we did not support extremist views. "He has written two books. At the time he was here he had the monograph of one he had called Jihad. He was very aggressive and very narrowminded. "He was not a practising Muslim and he was picking and choosing his things. He had no discipline and did not educate himself as a religious leader has to." The concerned imam contacted Sussex Police fearing trouble in Brighton but says officers were powerless to intervene. "At that time we knew we smelled a rat and told the police these people were not desirable in our community and needed to be arrested as extremists - but no one listened to us. "They used to distribute papers and we gave them to police and said these were dangerous people. Almost every week the literature used to come from him and I used to pass that to the police. I had an interview with them two or three times. "I worked closely with the police for the safety and the peace of the town. I was doing my job as a citizen to promote peace in this country. I was concerned about their extremist views. "You can feel a violent person when they speak violently. But no action was taken against anybody and the question of arrest did not come into it. "The police said unless they broke the law of the land, broke your arm or your hand, they were not going to arrest anyone." While staying at the Brighton mosque Hamza's views became increasingly extreme and he made the decision to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Dr Sajid said: "He was fascinated to change the world against the West. He went to Afghanistan to fight the USSR. I understand he went to Bosnia but somehow came back and had nothing to do." Abu Hamza left Brighton after completing his degree and headed for London. The two men did not cross swords again until many years later. The trustees at Finsbury Park were alarmed by the extremists led by Abu Hamza trying to take over their mosque and called on Dr Sajid for advice. "The president of the mosque had court orders against him. Otherwise there was going to be a fight and Abu Hamza would take control of the mosque. "Hamza started his preaching outside the mosque and you would be appalled to see how the police dealt with this man. They allowed him to preach to see who comes to this place. "Finsbury Park became a mosque of hatred and violence but the police did nothing to help." Abu Hamza was exposed as producing tapes of his sermons supporting Osama bin Laden and calling for Muslims to fight jihad "on their own doorsteps". He is accused of providing a satellite phone to the hostagetakers in Yemen, who included his own 16-year-old son, were linked to his Supporters of Sharia group and went on to kill four innocent people. A spokeswoman for Sussex Police said: "The police did conduct an investigation. The police obviously decided no arrestable offences were being committed. "We are in the same position as the Metropolitan Police was at that time in terms of the action we could take." A spokesman at the mosque, who did not want to be named, declined to comment on the arrest. Dr Sajid left Dyke Road seven years ago after a falling-out. The building has now been renamed the Alquds Mosque.