Theresa May has succeeded where previous home secretaries failed in deporting 'Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe'
The radical Islamist preacher Abu Qatada is a Palestinian-Jordanian born in Bethlehem, whose real name is Omar Othman. The 53-year-old spent more than eight years in a legal battle with successive home secretaries over his deportation to Jordan.
He eventually agreed to go only when Theresa May succeeded, unlike her predecessors , in securing an agreement with the Jordanians that he would not face a trial on his return based on evidence obtained by torture. His lawyers said he felt, for the first time in eight years, that he would be safe were he to return to Jordan.
In fact, May managed to snatch victory from the jaws of what looked like certain defeat after the European court of human rights ruled last year that returning Qatada to Jordan without that guarantee would amount to a "flagrant denial of justice". A verdict which had been upheld by the London courts.
The saga was not without moments of high farce. A mix-up over dates robbed May of the opportunity of deporting him last April.
For Labour and Conservative home secretaries, the Qatada case has been a deadly serious matter ever since it became clear that Qatada was at the centre of al-Qaida-related terror activity in Britain in the aftermath of 9/11.
As British judges have acknowledged, the record eight years that Qatada has been detained without charge over the past 11 years has been exceptional and "hardly acceptable". Some of them were spent in Belmarsh, the London high security jail, detained without charge until this was declared unlawful by the House of Lords.
The periods he has not been locked up have been spent under "virtual house arrest" specified by a control order or under the most restrictive bail conditions ever seen in English law, including 17-hour curfews.
It is not hard to see why the security services and judges have repeatedly concluded that the "reach and depth'' of Qatada's influence remains formidable and even incalculable. He has remained a threat to national security despite lengthy period in British cells.
As early as 2002, a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, who now advises Julian Assange, described him as "the spiritual head of the mujahideen in Britain", and "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe". At the time MI5 dismissed as unsound press reports that he had played a leading role in orchestrating or approving the Madrid train bombings.
It has long been accepted that Qatada had well-established links with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, having received funding from bin Laden as long ago as 1998. He has claimed that until he was singled out for vilification in Britain in 2001-02, he had been well-known in the Arab world as an Islamic scholar consulted by hundreds of people every week.
He claimed that the security services in the late 1990s had asked him to restrain "hotheads'' among Algerian refugees in Britain. An MI5 assessment in 1997 concluded that he did not believe in the international jihad movement, but the security services said his attitudes towards global jihad hardened later.
After 9/11 he began to justify suicide attacks. The same year the police found £170,000 in cash in his home, including £805 in an envelope labelled "for the mujahideen in Chechnya". Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, both jailed on terrorism charges, were said to have sought advice from Qatada. Some of his sermons were found in a Hamburg flat used by some of those involved in 9/11. No charges were brought.
In 2007, in a ruling by the special immigration appeals commission, Mr Justice Ouseley, criticised the security services for not taking Qatada's views seriously enough to prosecute him or prevent him from fundraising for terrorist groups and training in Afghanistan. "However, that inaction, based on the erroneous assessment of the damage which the preaching and propagating of radical views could do within this country and elsewhere, does not begin to undermine the assessment, that we find well-proved, that he is a risk to national security," Ouseley said.
That Qatada has never been prosecuted is often put down to the inadmissibility of intercept evidence in UK courts and the fact that he has always been careful to keep within the letter of the law while in Britain. In 2004, he was reported to have urged his supporters in a videotape to attack targets in Rome, saying: "Rome is a cross. The west is a cross and Romans are the owners of the cross. Muslims' target is the west. We will split Rome open. The destruction must be carried out by the sword." British judges regard it as typical of many such videos in circulation.
He first arrived in Britain in 1993 on a forged Emirates passport with a large group of Islamists who had sought refuge in London after fleeing from despotic Arab regimes they had been trying to overthrow. Qatada had been living near the Afghan border in Pakistan for two years and claimed he had been tortured by the Jordanian authorities and would be tortured again if he was forced to return.
He was recognised as a refugee on these grounds in 1994. He was then convicted in his absence in 1999 in the Jordanian state security court and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for conspiring to carry out terrorist acts with the Reform and Challenge Group.
His second conviction, in absentia, was for financial and other support for the "millennium plot" in which American and Israeli targets in Jordan were to be bombed at the time of the celebrations. He claimed both convictions were based on evidence obtained by torture from alleged co-conspirators.
In December 2001, just as the emergency terrorist legislation, which introduced indefinite detention without trial came into force, Qatada went into hiding. He was found the following October and detained in Belmarsh as a risk to national security as an al-Qaida-linked international terror suspect.
When that regime was ruled unlawful by the House of Lords in December 2004, he was released and placed under a control order with terms that were close to virtual house arrest.
After the July 2005 London bombings, Tony Blair declared that "the rules of the game had changed" and announced that the government would pursue a policy of "deportation with assurances". It was Qatada he had firmly in his sights. The first "memorandum of understanding'' that was signed was with Jordan in August that year. It was designed to ensure Qatada would not be tortured on his return and would be given a fair trial.
But the key issue of whether he would face a retrial based on evidence obtained by torture was only addressed in a side letter that had little legal force. As the human rights court at Strasbourg was to point out in January 2012, when the issue was finally tested, torture was "systemic" in the Jordanian state security court system and he was at serious risk of a "flagrant denial of justice''.
May has succeeded where Blair had failed. The most recent shuttle diplomacy has needed the time and goodwill of prime ministers and kings, but the new treaty between Britain and Jordan does finally provide the guarantee that he won't face evidence obtained by torture. It has taken more than 10 years and £1.7m of taxpayers' money but finally Qatada will finally be held to account in a court.