London MI5’s ‘Torture’ Evidence Revealed ¶ Ricin Conspiracy Collapsed

LONDON Oct. 21, 2005 — Eliza Manningham-Buller does not specifically mention torture in a statement to the law lords about using intelligence information from overseas. But she says: “Experience proves that detainee reporting can be accurate and may enable lives to be saved.”

Questions ‘rebuffed’

She points to information from Algerian agencies who questioned a man called Mohammed Meguerba. The evidence led to a raid on a London flat and the eventual uncovering of the so-called ricin plot.

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There has been press speculation that Meguerba was tortured.  

It was a weapon of mass destruction, a warning that we all needed to be “vigilant and alert”. Weeks before the invasion of Iraq, it was presented as the final proof that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qa’ida. Anyone wanting to exploit the politics of fear could scarcely conjure up anything more potent than the news that a suspected terrorist cell had been making ricin, one of the deadliest poisons known to man, in a north London flat.

But there was no ricin – a fact suppressed for more than two years.
There was no terrorist cell, just one deluded and dangerous man who killed a police officer during a bungled immigration raid. Kamel Bourgass (probably not his real name; he used several aliases) is serving life for the murder of Special Branch detective Stephen Oake, but despite more than 100 arrests and months of investigation which took detectives to 16 countries, no al-Qa’ida plot ever materialised.

The Collapse of the UK’s ‘ricin conspiracy’ Trial,

LONDON April 27, 2005 — A Guardian story on “The ricin ring that never was” has been pulled from the newspaper’s website, for what are said to be ‘legal reasons’.

If a PII did constitute the “legal reasons” it’s difficult to see where the public interest in the action lies. The removal of the article does however mean that one of the very few correctives to widespread ‘UK 911 poison terror scare’ hysteria no longer exists in the mainstream press.

Au contraire; the weekend after the end of the trial and the publication of the evidence, the Sunday Telegraph reported that we were/are faced with “chaos and panic in London’s public transport system”, and our security forces narrowly averted “our September 11, our Madrid. There is no doubt about it, if this had come off this would have been one of al-Qa’eda’s biggest strikes”, a “senior officer at Scotland Yard” told the paper.

Having observed the trial and – one presumes – read and digested the Porton evidence the “senior officer at Scotland Yard” should surely have grasped that smearing ricin on the handles of the Heathrow Express was a complete non-starter. Security forces’ ‘discovery’ of a ‘map’ of the train’s route is meanwhile baffling; the train is non-stop, so either you’re in it smearing away or you’re not. But perhaps the terrorists intended to fling gobs of it at ventilation intakes as the train whistled by.

Laboratory did not reveal absence of ricin in plot cited by Blair
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent

LONDON 16 Sept. 2005 — Vital evidence in a terror case that was used by Tony Blair to justify the war with Iraq was withheld by Britain’s top chemical weapons laboratory.

Tests demonstrating that no ricin was found at a flat linked to a gang suspected of planning a poison attack on the London Underground in January 2003 were not disclosed to police and ministers by officials at Porton Down.