NO POLICE officer will face charges for the shooting of Mohammed
Abdul Kahar in an ‘anti-terrorist’ dawn raid at Kahar’s home in Forest
Gate, east London, on 2 June. The wounded Kahar was arrested but
released without charge after a week in police custody.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) ruled that "no
criminal or disciplinary offence" had been committed by any police
officer. Astonishingly, according to Kahar’s solicitor, Gareth Peirce,
"the IPCC accepted statements that the officers prepared".
This IPCC whitewash of the police action came only weeks after the
decision not to prosecute any police involved in the fatal shooting of
Brazilian migrant worker Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell tube
station, south London, in July 2005. To add insult to injury the
firearms officers involved in this botched anti-terrorist operation have
been allowed to resume full duties.
These decisions underline what the socialist has consistently warned:
the police can act with impunity under the New Labour government’s
draconian anti-terrorist laws.
But while only a handful of the 1,000+ ‘terrorist suspects’ arrested
under these laws have been charged with ‘terrorist related’ offences,
the climate of fear generated by Blair’s ‘anti-terror’ campaign and
reinforced by the right-wing media, has led to increased racism and
Islamaphobia against Asian, Middle Eastern and Muslim people.
Even the Met Police assistant commissioner, Tarique Ghaffur, has
admitted that there is "a real risk of criminalising minority
communities," and that Islamaphobia had created an angry generation of
young Muslims "vulnerable to extremism".
Like the elephant in the living room that nobody talks about, Blair
refuses to recognise the causal link between his disastrous foreign
policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, and the
increased support for Islamist terrorist organisations.
