LazyLob
05-30-2006, 04:31 AM
This is an example as to why our gov is in such shambles and not just with illegals:
The Times May 30, 2006
Bigamy, fraud, deceit: how Abu Hamza became a British citizen
By Sean O'Neill and Daniel McGrory
He claims to despise everything Britain stands for, yet the radical Abu Hamza went to extraordinary lengths to stay here, write our correspondents in this extract from their book The Suicide Factory
THE young Egyptian held the sheet of paper in both hands and, in heavily accented English, read the words in front of him carefully: “I, Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, do solemnly and sincerely affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors, according to the law.”
Mostafa then signed the official form, the signature formally witnessed by his solicitor and the document placed in the out-tray to be posted to the Home Office.
Ten days later a certificate of naturalisation, declaring him to be a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, dropped through the letterbox of Mostafa’s London council flat.
For the man who would become known as Abu Hamza al-Masri — possibly the most hated man in Britain and someone who would angrily despise British values — this was quite an achievement. British citizenship was a goal he had pursued almost from the day he stepped off a flight from Cairo seven years before.
Abu Hamza had accomplished his aim with a display of ruthless and cynical dishonesty. Had his applications for refugee status been properly scrutinised by immigration officials, he could have been deported as an illegal immigrant and a fraudster long before he stirred up trouble. Those investigations were never undertaken. Instead, on Tuesday, 29 April 1986, he swore allegiance to the Crown and won the right to stay in Britain for ever.
Ironically, he took that oath of allegiance as he was on the cusp of his conversion to a brand of political and religious fanaticism that would lead him to regard his adopted country as a godless, decadent land whose Queen deserved the sword rather than his allegiance.
But Abu Hamza, the fanatical preacher of hatred, was a completely different person from Mostafa, the 21-year-old student who disembarked at Heathrow airport on 13 July 1979.
He arrived in Britain in the year of Margaret Thatcher’s election, the IRA murder of Lord Mountbatten and the rise of a Pope who would challenge communism. But the changes that would have the longest-lasting global impact were happening in the Muslim world that Mostafa was leaving behind. For 1979 was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an event that revived the concept of jihad in defence of the Muslim religion and lands. It spawned war without end for the Afghan people and the brand of global terrorism that would be propagated by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
Such things could not have been further from the mind of the young Mostafa Kamel Mostafa when he left his middle-class home in Alexandria.
From the moment he arrived in London, he wanted to stay — not least because he could avoid national service in the military back home.
Abu Hamza was a powerfully-built young man with a thick mop of curly hair, golden brown skin, an infectious smile and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. London offered things he hankered after more than a degree in engineering and years in the army — most especially women and wealth.
“He had this huge chest, huge broad shoulders and big biceps, he had awesome genetics,” remembered a friend. “He just had to look at a weight bar and he’d put on more muscle. He wore jeans and T-shirts and usually had a gold chain around his neck. He was cool and, yes, he was a womaniser. He was an Egyptian after all, what do you expect?” Although his one-month visitor’s visa ruled out working, the young Mostafa quickly found a job and liked the feel of English pound notes in his pocket. A month after his arrival he applied to extend his stay by another month. Permission was granted without question, on the same “no work” condition that he, like many others, was blissfully ignoring.
One of his several jobs was as night porter in a bed and breakfast hotel not far from Paddington rail station. Here, in the spring of 1980, he met Valerie Traverso, a mother of three young children who was pregnant by Michael Macias, the husband from whom she had recently separated.
Valerie, then 25, felt an immediate attraction to the young Egyptian, and her feelings seemed to be reciprocated. He was a hunk, he paid her attention, and he made her laugh. She remembers his “nice, big hands”, his eyes and his coffee brown skin. As a single parent, down on her luck,Valerie was flattered that the exotic young foreigner was interested in her.
But the future Abu Hamza’s interest in Valerie seems to have been more than just a physical one. He was an illegal immigrant, having failed to renew his visa when it expired the previous September. Valerie’s pregnancy presented him with an opportunity. If he could marry her and persuade her to let him claim that he was the father of her child, his immigration status would be vastly improved.
He acted quickly. One night, not long after they first met, he came straight up to her and kissed her passionately. He was direct and physical, and she found him hard to resist. ‘He made the first move,’ she said. ‘I’m not the sort of person to do that kind of thing. It was there in the kitchen. I was surprised, I hadn’t long come out of a long relationship and was surprised with myself more than anything. Things moved pretty fast. We became very close very quickly. But he was also a romantic man, quite tender and softly spoken. We laughed a lot.’
The sex was good, but when Abu Hamza suggested they get married, Valerie turned him down. There were lots of women after the young night porter. Valerie did not trust Abu Hamza to stay faithful when there were so many other women who would not encumber him with a brood of young children. But he persisted with his marriage proposal, and before long she relented. They were married in Westminster Register Office on 16 May 1980.
Valerie has repeatedly insisted that the marriage was the result of a genuine love affair. But she can hardly have been unaware of Abu Hamza’s immigration status. Significantly, when they married she spelt her name on the register incorrectly, as “Traversa” and not “Traverso”. At the time she and her first husband were separated but not divorced. They did not divorce until July 1982, so her marriage to Abu Hamza was bigamous. Valerie has protested in interviews since that there was no intent on her or Abu Hamza’s part to marry illegally. It was a mix-up, a simple confusion. But within a few months a second false entry was being made on an official register.
On 26 September 1980, Valerie gave birth to the child with whom she had been pregnant when she met Abu Hamza. Within four days of the baby’s birth, Abu Hamza instructed lawyers to write to the Home Office stating that the young Egyptian immigrant had married an Englishwoman and become a father. He had been living in Britain illegally, but now that he had a wife and child here he wanted to “regularise” his stay. He wanted to remain in the country indefinitely.
Such a claim would have to be supported by documentary evidence, namely marriage and birth certificates. The wedding document the couple already had. On October 22, the birth of Valerie’s daughter was recorded at the office of the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Lambeth. The child’s name was entered as Nahed Donna Mostafa, and the name of her father was registered as Mostafa Kamel Mostafa. He gave his birthplace as Egypt and his occupation as “labourer”.
Abu Hamza signed the register “Mostafa”.
The name of the child’s mother was recorded as Valerie Olga Macias – using the surname of her first husband, to whom she was still legally married. She gave her maiden name as Traverso – spelling it correctly on this occasion. Beside Mostafa’s signature, the name “V. Macias” was signed.
The marriage of Abu Hamza and Valerie Traverso was not legal. It appears that the registration of Valerie’s daughter’s birth was also illegal. Valerie insists to this day that she was pregnant when she met Abu Hamza – she is “150 per cent on that”. If that is true, the birth certificate for the child, which states that he is the father, is a fraudulent document. Now registered as both a husband and a father under British law, Abu Hamza had a strong claim to be allowed to live legally in Britain — a claim based on a double deception.
The image of the family man was hard to maintain. Abu Hamza’s work as a Soho doorman took him to brothels and bed shows, and onto streets ripe with temptation.
The working girls were often grateful for the protection of their musclebound guardian. Abu Hamza began at least one affair. He has always been coy about this period of his life, bemoaning the men who came “to fantasise” at these places, but adding: “I was a very undisciplined Muslim.”
Back home, busy with nappies and night feeds and waiting for the scrape of his key in the lock each night, Valerie became increasingly suspicious of her husband’s nocturnal activities. Eventually, after a noisy confrontation, he admitted that he had had an affair with a girl he met through the club. The Sun has reported that her former husband’s lover was a prostitute.
This confession was to be one of the key turning points that would put Abu Hamza on to the path of radical Islam. Until that moment he had shown little interest in being a Muslim.
But when Valerie threatened to leave him he must have realised that he could not afford to be deserted. His immigration status was not secure.
She said: “I told him that things had gone too far and I was leaving. He responded by saying that he would change and he would dedicate himself to Islam. He swore that he would never do it again. He was going to be religious, he was going to pray and ask for God’s help.”
In April 1982 the Home Office informed him that he had to extend the validity of his Egyptian passport before it could consider his case further. The passport had expired, rendering him in a stateless limbo.
He responded in June, claiming that the Egyptian embassy in London had refused to renew his passport because he was a young man of army age. He was supposed to return home for national service. Two months later — perhaps because the threat of conscription was considered oppressive — the Home Office decided to give Abu Hamza permission to remain in Britain indefinitely. He was now one short step way from his goal of citizenship.
With his position in Britain secure, Abu Hamza’s marriage to Valerie began to go off the rails. They separated and it was Abu Hamza who petitioned for divorce in June 1984, naming Valerie as respondent and referring to an unknown corespondent.
The divorce was uncontested and the decree absolute was issued at Wandsworth County Court, south London, on 15 August 1984.
A little more than two months later, Abu Hamza married his second wife in an Islamic ceremony in London. Nagat Chaffe, a Moroccan, was also divorced with a young child. As he became a notorious public figure, she remained firmly in the background, the dutiful and veiled wife and mother.
Their first child, Mostafa Kamel Hamza, was born in 1986, and it was his birth that gave his father the nickname, of Abu Hamza, “the father of Hamza”. Abu Hamza and Nagat would go on to have five more children – three sons and two daughters – the youngest born in 1997.
Abu Hamza formally applied for full citizenship in November 1984. It was granted in the spring of 1986, on the basis of five years’ continuous residence. All he had to do in return was pledge allegiance to the Crown.
# Extracted from The Suicide Factory: Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park Mosque by Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory, to be published by HarperCollins on June 19,© Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory 2006
The Times May 30, 2006
Bigamy, fraud, deceit: how Abu Hamza became a British citizen
By Sean O'Neill and Daniel McGrory
He claims to despise everything Britain stands for, yet the radical Abu Hamza went to extraordinary lengths to stay here, write our correspondents in this extract from their book The Suicide Factory
THE young Egyptian held the sheet of paper in both hands and, in heavily accented English, read the words in front of him carefully: “I, Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, do solemnly and sincerely affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors, according to the law.”
Mostafa then signed the official form, the signature formally witnessed by his solicitor and the document placed in the out-tray to be posted to the Home Office.
Ten days later a certificate of naturalisation, declaring him to be a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, dropped through the letterbox of Mostafa’s London council flat.
For the man who would become known as Abu Hamza al-Masri — possibly the most hated man in Britain and someone who would angrily despise British values — this was quite an achievement. British citizenship was a goal he had pursued almost from the day he stepped off a flight from Cairo seven years before.
Abu Hamza had accomplished his aim with a display of ruthless and cynical dishonesty. Had his applications for refugee status been properly scrutinised by immigration officials, he could have been deported as an illegal immigrant and a fraudster long before he stirred up trouble. Those investigations were never undertaken. Instead, on Tuesday, 29 April 1986, he swore allegiance to the Crown and won the right to stay in Britain for ever.
Ironically, he took that oath of allegiance as he was on the cusp of his conversion to a brand of political and religious fanaticism that would lead him to regard his adopted country as a godless, decadent land whose Queen deserved the sword rather than his allegiance.
But Abu Hamza, the fanatical preacher of hatred, was a completely different person from Mostafa, the 21-year-old student who disembarked at Heathrow airport on 13 July 1979.
He arrived in Britain in the year of Margaret Thatcher’s election, the IRA murder of Lord Mountbatten and the rise of a Pope who would challenge communism. But the changes that would have the longest-lasting global impact were happening in the Muslim world that Mostafa was leaving behind. For 1979 was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an event that revived the concept of jihad in defence of the Muslim religion and lands. It spawned war without end for the Afghan people and the brand of global terrorism that would be propagated by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
Such things could not have been further from the mind of the young Mostafa Kamel Mostafa when he left his middle-class home in Alexandria.
From the moment he arrived in London, he wanted to stay — not least because he could avoid national service in the military back home.
Abu Hamza was a powerfully-built young man with a thick mop of curly hair, golden brown skin, an infectious smile and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. London offered things he hankered after more than a degree in engineering and years in the army — most especially women and wealth.
“He had this huge chest, huge broad shoulders and big biceps, he had awesome genetics,” remembered a friend. “He just had to look at a weight bar and he’d put on more muscle. He wore jeans and T-shirts and usually had a gold chain around his neck. He was cool and, yes, he was a womaniser. He was an Egyptian after all, what do you expect?” Although his one-month visitor’s visa ruled out working, the young Mostafa quickly found a job and liked the feel of English pound notes in his pocket. A month after his arrival he applied to extend his stay by another month. Permission was granted without question, on the same “no work” condition that he, like many others, was blissfully ignoring.
One of his several jobs was as night porter in a bed and breakfast hotel not far from Paddington rail station. Here, in the spring of 1980, he met Valerie Traverso, a mother of three young children who was pregnant by Michael Macias, the husband from whom she had recently separated.
Valerie, then 25, felt an immediate attraction to the young Egyptian, and her feelings seemed to be reciprocated. He was a hunk, he paid her attention, and he made her laugh. She remembers his “nice, big hands”, his eyes and his coffee brown skin. As a single parent, down on her luck,Valerie was flattered that the exotic young foreigner was interested in her.
But the future Abu Hamza’s interest in Valerie seems to have been more than just a physical one. He was an illegal immigrant, having failed to renew his visa when it expired the previous September. Valerie’s pregnancy presented him with an opportunity. If he could marry her and persuade her to let him claim that he was the father of her child, his immigration status would be vastly improved.
He acted quickly. One night, not long after they first met, he came straight up to her and kissed her passionately. He was direct and physical, and she found him hard to resist. ‘He made the first move,’ she said. ‘I’m not the sort of person to do that kind of thing. It was there in the kitchen. I was surprised, I hadn’t long come out of a long relationship and was surprised with myself more than anything. Things moved pretty fast. We became very close very quickly. But he was also a romantic man, quite tender and softly spoken. We laughed a lot.’
The sex was good, but when Abu Hamza suggested they get married, Valerie turned him down. There were lots of women after the young night porter. Valerie did not trust Abu Hamza to stay faithful when there were so many other women who would not encumber him with a brood of young children. But he persisted with his marriage proposal, and before long she relented. They were married in Westminster Register Office on 16 May 1980.
Valerie has repeatedly insisted that the marriage was the result of a genuine love affair. But she can hardly have been unaware of Abu Hamza’s immigration status. Significantly, when they married she spelt her name on the register incorrectly, as “Traversa” and not “Traverso”. At the time she and her first husband were separated but not divorced. They did not divorce until July 1982, so her marriage to Abu Hamza was bigamous. Valerie has protested in interviews since that there was no intent on her or Abu Hamza’s part to marry illegally. It was a mix-up, a simple confusion. But within a few months a second false entry was being made on an official register.
On 26 September 1980, Valerie gave birth to the child with whom she had been pregnant when she met Abu Hamza. Within four days of the baby’s birth, Abu Hamza instructed lawyers to write to the Home Office stating that the young Egyptian immigrant had married an Englishwoman and become a father. He had been living in Britain illegally, but now that he had a wife and child here he wanted to “regularise” his stay. He wanted to remain in the country indefinitely.
Such a claim would have to be supported by documentary evidence, namely marriage and birth certificates. The wedding document the couple already had. On October 22, the birth of Valerie’s daughter was recorded at the office of the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Lambeth. The child’s name was entered as Nahed Donna Mostafa, and the name of her father was registered as Mostafa Kamel Mostafa. He gave his birthplace as Egypt and his occupation as “labourer”.
Abu Hamza signed the register “Mostafa”.
The name of the child’s mother was recorded as Valerie Olga Macias – using the surname of her first husband, to whom she was still legally married. She gave her maiden name as Traverso – spelling it correctly on this occasion. Beside Mostafa’s signature, the name “V. Macias” was signed.
The marriage of Abu Hamza and Valerie Traverso was not legal. It appears that the registration of Valerie’s daughter’s birth was also illegal. Valerie insists to this day that she was pregnant when she met Abu Hamza – she is “150 per cent on that”. If that is true, the birth certificate for the child, which states that he is the father, is a fraudulent document. Now registered as both a husband and a father under British law, Abu Hamza had a strong claim to be allowed to live legally in Britain — a claim based on a double deception.
The image of the family man was hard to maintain. Abu Hamza’s work as a Soho doorman took him to brothels and bed shows, and onto streets ripe with temptation.
The working girls were often grateful for the protection of their musclebound guardian. Abu Hamza began at least one affair. He has always been coy about this period of his life, bemoaning the men who came “to fantasise” at these places, but adding: “I was a very undisciplined Muslim.”
Back home, busy with nappies and night feeds and waiting for the scrape of his key in the lock each night, Valerie became increasingly suspicious of her husband’s nocturnal activities. Eventually, after a noisy confrontation, he admitted that he had had an affair with a girl he met through the club. The Sun has reported that her former husband’s lover was a prostitute.
This confession was to be one of the key turning points that would put Abu Hamza on to the path of radical Islam. Until that moment he had shown little interest in being a Muslim.
But when Valerie threatened to leave him he must have realised that he could not afford to be deserted. His immigration status was not secure.
She said: “I told him that things had gone too far and I was leaving. He responded by saying that he would change and he would dedicate himself to Islam. He swore that he would never do it again. He was going to be religious, he was going to pray and ask for God’s help.”
In April 1982 the Home Office informed him that he had to extend the validity of his Egyptian passport before it could consider his case further. The passport had expired, rendering him in a stateless limbo.
He responded in June, claiming that the Egyptian embassy in London had refused to renew his passport because he was a young man of army age. He was supposed to return home for national service. Two months later — perhaps because the threat of conscription was considered oppressive — the Home Office decided to give Abu Hamza permission to remain in Britain indefinitely. He was now one short step way from his goal of citizenship.
With his position in Britain secure, Abu Hamza’s marriage to Valerie began to go off the rails. They separated and it was Abu Hamza who petitioned for divorce in June 1984, naming Valerie as respondent and referring to an unknown corespondent.
The divorce was uncontested and the decree absolute was issued at Wandsworth County Court, south London, on 15 August 1984.
A little more than two months later, Abu Hamza married his second wife in an Islamic ceremony in London. Nagat Chaffe, a Moroccan, was also divorced with a young child. As he became a notorious public figure, she remained firmly in the background, the dutiful and veiled wife and mother.
Their first child, Mostafa Kamel Hamza, was born in 1986, and it was his birth that gave his father the nickname, of Abu Hamza, “the father of Hamza”. Abu Hamza and Nagat would go on to have five more children – three sons and two daughters – the youngest born in 1997.
Abu Hamza formally applied for full citizenship in November 1984. It was granted in the spring of 1986, on the basis of five years’ continuous residence. All he had to do in return was pledge allegiance to the Crown.
# Extracted from The Suicide Factory: Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park Mosque by Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory, to be published by HarperCollins on June 19,© Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory 2006