Comment: Usman Khan, the stabby-jihadi shot dead on London Bridge yesterday was a 'student and personal friend' of the following character, Anjem Choudary, the British intelligence asset who - among other things - got his 'students' to wave those ridiculous placards demanding 'Sharia Law NOW!' in the immediate years after 9/11.
© LUKE MACGREGOR/REUTERSAnjem Choudary has been at the forefront of radical Islam in Britain for two decades
Met counter-terror officers often felt they had enough evidence to build a case against the radicalising cleric, only to be told to hang fire by MI5, because he was crucial to one of their on-going investigations, a source has claimed.
Comment: Their on-going use of terrorism for political control of the population, more like.
The situation led to tension between the two sides with police feeling "frustrated" that Choudary was not being brought to justice, the source added.
After almost 20-years at the forefront of radical Islam in Britain, Choudary was finally convicted of a terrorism offence last month and faces up to ten years in prison when he is sentenced on September 6.
Comment: So they finally 'got him', right? WRONG. Choudary was released in 2018, along with Khan a bunch of their fellow stabby-jihadis.
But following his conviction it was revealed that the 49-year-old former lawyer had been linked to at least 15 terror plots dating back as far as 2001.
© MATT DUNHAM/APScotland Yard counter terror officers had been pursuing Choudary for more than a decade
But there have been questions about why it took the authorities so long to prosecute Choudary, with some suggesting the law was not adequate.
However one counter-terrorism source, who investigated Choudary on numerous occasions, insisted the decision not to prosecute him had come from the security service, MI5.
He said:
"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. While the police might have had lots of evidence they were pulled back by the security service because he [Choudary] was one of the people they were monitoring. It was very frustrating and did cause some tension but we were told we had to consider the bigger picture."
Comment: The bigger picture being the usefulness to British intelligence of 'radical Islamism' to terrorize the population and thus influence British politics to their liking.
Security expert Will Geddes said while the police and security service had a good record of working together, there was often a difficult balance to strike between prosecuting evidence and gathering intelligence.
He said:
"Whilst the cops always want the collars the spooks want the information and it is a challenge getting the right balance. Choudary was certainly clever and knew where the line was and that was part of the reason it took so long to get him, but it was certainly possible that MI5 wanted to continue to monitor him because he was the focal point of so much.
Given how influential he was in terms of setting up the forums for those guys to get inspired, it made perfect sense for the intelligence agencies to say 'we haven't exhausted this yet'. In the end though he got caught because he believed his press too much and he got carried away with his own media profile."
© BBC NEWSChoudary with one of the Lee Rigby killers
"Intelligence officers have to generate leads somewhere, so if you have got a kind of honeypot that is Anjem Choudary and every nutter in the UK is gravitating towards him and from there you just trail them and follow them, you can see how it's doing your job for you in some ways. There is undoubtedly an element of security folk who work in the intelligence side who would probably see this as something that is potentially quite useful."
Comment: Yes, to spook the population with stabby-jihadis they know represent no real threat in terms of them ever overthrowing the regime in favor of some barmy 'Sharia-run UK'.
But he said he believed the authorities had always intended to convict Choudary as soon as they had a strong enough case to take him out. He said:
"I feel like there was a desire to do it, I think Anjem was just very careful about what he said and how he said it and he made sure he never associated himself specifically with the plot.
"Was it possible that the agencies were like 'Let's focus on the guys actually making bombs rather than the guy who is loosely somewhere in the background, let's focus on him later', that's possible, but I would be very surprised if you found a directive somewhere in [MI5] or somewhere else that said 'Don't touch him because he's more useful out there than he is inside.'"
Comment: Yeah well, they obviously didn't intend to 'take him out'. Choudary is a free man, and his 'students' are still periodically causing mayhem on the streets of London.
Choudary was already way up the 'al-Qaeda' (which literally means the database) food chain back in 1999, when he was Bin Laden's chief recruiter in the UK, sending low-IQ boys of Muslim origin to training camps across the UK before they would be shipped out to fight the Anglo-Americans' proxy wars in Chechnya, Kashmir, Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
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