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Tuesday May 15,2007
John reid admits the suspect is a real risk
A TERROR suspect cleared of a ricin poison plot is free to walk England’s streets after a ruling that he is no longer a threat to national security.
Algerian Mouloud Sihali won an appeal against deportation yesterday – despite a warning from Home Secretary John Reid that he remained “a real risk”.
The Home Office will now have to consider his claim for asylum, a decade after he slipped into England illegally.
Yesterday the Special Immigration Appeals Commission concluded that Sihali no longer presented a risk to national security and should not be deported to Algeria.
But it accepted he was an “unprincipled and dishonest individual, determined to make the best of his circumstances in England for his own purposes alone”.
Sihali, 30, was acquitted in the ricin plot trial in April 2005.
It was alleged that a terror cell planned to put the toxin on car door handles in North London.
The security services alleged Sihali was associated with-known terrorists and involved in providing assistance, including an attempt to obtain a £15,000 loan for one of them.
He had stayed at Finsbury Park mosque, a base for the extremist cleric Abu Hamza.
