Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 8 June 2017

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Two Australians killed by the British state’s terrorists: Turnbull must demand justice

The London Bridge terrorists who killed two young Australian women and six others were from a cell of extreme Islamists responsible for multiple terrorist attacks. Last August, London’s brave police, who are too regularly forced to respond to the carnage that terrorists cause, accused MI5 of protecting their leader from arrest. Malcolm Turnbull must demand his old school chum Theresa May explain why MI5, which she oversaw for six years as British Home Secretary, protected the activities of demented terrorists who have now destroyed the lives of two young Australians.

Theresa May is presently trying to exploit the terrorist attack for political gain, by demanding even more powers for MI5, even powers that breach human rights agreements. If anything, she should be run out of office for slashing UK police numbers by 20,000, which made the British public decidedly less safe. But she has overseen an operation that is far worse than that: MI5’s active collusion with terrorists groups that commit atrocities in other countries like Libya and Syria, and also in the UK.

MI5 knew everything it needed to know to prevent the London Bridge attack! The perpetrators were not just “known” to MI5, as all terrorists turn out to be, they were very well known. They were followers of Anjem Choudary, a notorious Islamist hate preacher who was eventually jailed last year for terrorism offences. Choudary was one of the leaders of al-Muhajiroun, a pro-terrorist organisation banned in 2005, but which continued to operate under different names. Its founder had boasted in 1998 that it operated under a “covenant” of security with MI5, which for Choudary appears to have continued.

Choudary was finally convicted after the British police had tied him to 15 terrorist attacks and the recruitment of an estimated 500 jihadis who had travelled to Syria to join ISIS. The 21 August 2016 Telegraph reported, under the headline “MI5 stopped Scotland Yard taking Choudary down, sources claim”, the complaints of Met police that MI5 had repeatedly prevented them from arresting Choudary. This was despite the fact Choudary’s followers had committed brutal terrorists attacks, including the 2013 murder of British soldier Lee Rigby by public beheading in a London street.

A Met counter-terrorism officer told the Telegraph: “I am gobsmacked that we allowed him to carry on as long as long as he did. He was up to his neck in it but the police can’t do full investigations on people if the security service say they are working on a really big job, because they have the priority. That is what they did constantly.”

Here is how well MI5 knew the London Bridge killers. After two of Choudary’s followers killed Lee Rigby in 2013, Choudary held a demonstration in their support outside Westminster parliament. London Bridge killer Khuram Butt was at that demonstration, and attacked Muslims who argued with Choudary as “traitors”. In 2014, Butt was filmed for a Channel 4 documentary entitled The Jihadis Next Door, which also featured another notorious Choudary follower and hate preacher in his own right, Siddhartha Dhar. In September 2014, Dhar was charged with terrorism offences and given bail, but despite being ordered to hand in his passport, was somehow able to skip bail and travel with his whole family to Syria to join ISIS, where he appeared in an ISIS execution video, and became known as the new “Jihadi John”.

Another of the London Bridge attackers, Rachid Redouane, was also a follower of Choudary. The 6 June Telegraph reports he fought to overthrow Qaddafi in Libya in 2011, and joined a militia that went to Syria to fight alongside al-Qaeda to overthrow Assad. He was able to enter the UK from Ireland, where a Muslim imam Shaykh Dr Umar al-Qadri told the Telegraph he had repeatedly warned the authorities that there was a cell of ISIS and al-Qaeda activists based, but his warnings had been ignored.

The third attacker, Youssef Zaghba, is claimed to have not been known to MI5, but that claim is contradicted by Italy’s security services, who insist they did warn the British authorities about him. His Italian mother told the Mirror on 7 June that she can’t believe the British police weren’t watching him, because whenever he visited her in Italy the Italian authorities kept him under strict surveillance. Zaghba had also been detained in Turkey trying to enter Syria on a one-way ticket.

MI5 claims that it has 23,000 extremists to monitor, and these three slipped through the cracks. But surely, with their records, especially Butt’s, of direct association with other terrorists who had committed attacks on British soil and joined ISIS, MI5 would have prioritised them above most of the other 23,000? Either MI5 is completely incompetent, or it is running a dirty operation that has led to the murder of innocent people, including Australians.

The truth is that MI5 is not incompetent. Like Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, the three London bridge attackers were either directly involved in fighting with terrorist groups in Libya and Syria, or indirectly by recruiting jihadis through Choudary’s network. The objective for which they were fighting, the overthrow of Qaddafi and Assad, was and is British government policy! Anybody who has studied the Libyan and Syrian conflicts knows the UK and USA have backed actual terrorists to achieve their goal of regime change. The evidence points to MI5 actively recruiting such terrorists from among the army of jihadists it has cultivated in the UK. That evidence also comes from the Manchester attack, which revealed that Theresa May’s Home Office lifted control orders on actual al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group terrorists in Manchester to enable them to travel to Libya to fight to overthrow Qaddafi.

It is a mistake to think that the terrorists who struck Manchester and London Bridge are exacting revenge, and to characterise their attacks as “blowback”. The truth is far worse. These are the British state’s own terrorists. Their attacks achieve nothing except mass death and public terror, but they provide a pretext for Theresa May to demand more powers for MI5. The British state’s collusion with terrorists has now claimed the lives of two wonderful young Australians. This is an evil, criminal policy that no citizen should tolerate. Australians should insist that our government demand an end to this policy and justice for its victims.

Sources
• The Manchester terror attack: the role of Prince Charles
• Terror in Britain: What did the Prime Minister know? By John Pilger
• Update: A London attacker’s links to UK covert operations in Syria and Libya, by Mark Curtis
• Londonistan: Britain’s ‘green light’ to terrorism, by Mark Curtis

Click here for a free copy of the Australian Alert Service, which features the ongoing series: “MI5/MI6 Run Terrorism”.

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