Islamic organisation criticised as ‘hypocrites’

BRITAIN’S leading Muslim organisation was criticised as “hypocrites” yesterday for calling on community leaders to guard against terrorists.

Watched by uniformed police officers, radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza held his usual Friday prayers on the pavement outside north London’s Finsbury Park Mosque.

Hamza told nearly 150 Muslims that the only person who cared about the Muslim Council of Britain’s letter was Prime Minister Tony Blair. “This is basically an example of compliance between Tony Blair and the MCB,” he told the men who sat quietly on a makeshift plastic prayer mat.

“They are planning some form of election material. It is propaganda.”

This week the MCB contacted a thousand mosques urging them to maintain the “utmost vigilance” in the war against terror.

The appeal to the two-million-strong Muslim population was being made through imans, chairman and secretaries of the mosques. One of the young men who gathered to hear Hamza’s sermon relayed his message to friends by holding his mobile phones towards his booming voice. Hamza told them: “the MCB are hypocrites. They issued a statement for all mosques in England. They claim they speak on our behalf. Nobody cares about them.”

He tried to dismiss the huge bomb-making material found by police this week as a “created material” and the arrests as a “conspiracy against these brothers.”

Meanwhile, the mosque where six of the nine men arrested in anti-terror raids worship denied any involvement in extremism. Jaleel Meedin, a spokesman for Crawley Mosque, said it had “no connection with any organisation that threatens anyone’s safety.”