A top Al-Qaeda operative deliberately planted information linking the terrorist outfit with Iraq to encourage the US invasion of the country, a spy who infiltrated the outfit has claimed.
The claim was made by Omar Nasiri, a pseudonym for a Moroccan who said he had spent seven years working for European security and intelligence agencies, including MI5, the British intelligence agency.
He said Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran training camps in Afghanistan, told his US interrogators that Al-Qaeda had been training Iraqis. Nasiri said Libi 'needed' the conflict in Iraq as it was the 'weakest' Muslim country.
Libi was captured in November 2001 and taken to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured.
Asked on the BBC2's Newsnight on Thursday whether Libi or other jihadists would have told the truth if they were tortured, Nasiri replied: 'never.' Nasiri recalled hearing Libi refer to Iraq as a place to fight the jihad.
"I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?" Libi said. It is known that under interrogation, Libi misled Washington. His claims were seized on by US President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell to attack Iraq.
In his address to the UN Security Council in February 2003, Powell had argued the case for a pre-emptive war against Iraq. Though he did not name Libi, Powell said: "A senior terrorist operative who was responsible for one of al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan had told US agencies that Saddam Hussein had offered to train Al-Qaeda
What is new, if Nasiri is to be believed, is that the leading Al-Qaeda operative wanted to overthrow Saddam and use Iraq as a jihadist base. Nasiri also said that part of the Al-Qaeda training was to withstand interrogation and provide false information.
Nasiri said he was later sent to London by his French handlers to infiltrate Finsbury Park mosque and spy on its imam, Abu Hamza, as well as another radical cleric, Abu Qatada. He said Mi5 and French intelligence were watching the two clerics in London from as far back as 1997.
He said he told them that Abu Hamza was carrying out combat training and how he listened into conversations relaying messages between abu Qatada and the training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hamza was charged in 2003 and convicted this year for incitement to murder and race hate crimes.
"At the time we did not think that the growing threat from Al-Qaeda and Osama bin laden was sufficient to put more resources on it," Bob Milton, a Metropolitan police special branch officer, told Newsnight.
"We were monitoring what he was doing, certainly working with the US and European colleagues to do that. But at that time we were still unsure what the threat would be," he said.
