To Hassaine, the mosque has looked nefarious for years. He listened with other Muslim men as the cleric Abu Hamza al-Mazri, who preaches most Fridays, expressed solidarity with Osama bin Laden. Hassaine was there in 1999 when Abu Hamza’s son Mohammed Kamel Mustapha and a stepson, Mohsen Ghailan, were convicted in Yemen of attempting to bomb the only Christian church in Aden, as well as a hotel and the British Consulate. He was there when Djamel Beghal allegedly recruited fighters for the bin Laden-linked extremist group Takfir-wal-Hijra (Anathema and Exile). And he was there when Zain al Abidin allegedly drafted young Muslims into combat training provided by a company called Sakina Security. The vast majority of the Muslims he mixed with at the mosque were too busy earning a living and caring for their families to engage in shadowy activities. But others had different aspirations. Some people at the mosque, Hassaine told NEWSWEEK, “have one foot in the mosque and the other in the terrorist mafias.”
So Hassaine was not surprised when, after Sept. 11, the Finsbury Park mosque was transformed into a landmark on the world’s newly drawn terror map. British police arrested Zain al Abidin. The French authorities released new information alleging that Djamel Beghal, who was arrested in Dubai last July, was plotting a series of terrorist attacks across Europe, including flying an explosives-laden helicopter into the U.S. Embassy in Paris. As for Abu Hamza, rather than condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he has spun conspiracy theories about them. The guilty party: Israel.
Today Hassaine is a bespectacled Algerian journalist of 40 who thinly disguises his identity under a baseball cap. He came to Britain in the mid-1990s as an exile under a death threat from the powerful GIA (Armed Islamic Group). Desperate for a passport–which he figured a government intelligence service might give him in return for information–he claims to have infiltrated the mosque between 1997 and earlier this year. He says he worked first for the French DGSE and later for Britain’s M.I.5.
Hassaine was paying attention long before the mosque attained its newfound notoriety. But little was done with the information he provided. He maintains that his French handlers complained to him that the British were too cautious, too protective of civil liberties and–having to cope with their homegrown IRA terrorism–too worried about bringing upon themselves a new layer of terrorism from abroad. When the French didn’t give him the passport he was seeking, Hassaine went over to the British. His British contacts were only marginally more helpful to him.
With his marriage falling apart, his two young children living away from him, Hassaine’s life is “like a rat’s.” Now he is lying low, along with the Muslims of Finsbury Park and Britain’s 2 million other people of the Islamic faith. After prayers at the mosque last Friday, Adbul Hakeem, a newcomer from Spain, complained that Abu Hamza has drawn too much undeserved attention: “We Muslims must keep our mouths shut. We must let Allah correct people. Allah will show them what is right and what is not.”
In the end, Hassaine says, the British government gave him resident status (“exceptional leave to remain”) in exchange for his work. M.I.5, through its mouthpiece at the Home Office, declined to comment. The French were only slightly more forthcoming. “He tried to offer information to us,” said a senior official at their embassy in London. “It was not of any interest.” Reda Hassaine, said the official, was “a small fish.” Hassaine certainly feels that way. But after Sept. 11, he is newly hopeful. “Now we all know what terror is,” he says. “In that sense, we are all Algerians now. So thanks be to God, in one way, for what happened in America–because it’s like waking up somebody who can make order.”
