Could Osama bin Laden's mouthpiece be about to mentor children? As a chilling picture emerges of Adel Abdel Bary in a Birmingham youth centre, how the convicted terrorist still lives on benefits in his £1m council house on an exclusive London street
The bearded man sitting behind a desk is Adel Abdel Bary. Many people might remember the name, if not the face.
Behind this new photograph of him is a story which raises worrying questions about the restrictions – or lack of them – placed on convicted terrorists and is symptomatic, some would argue, of the kind of place Britain has now become.
First, though let us remind you of who Bary is.
He is synonymous with an era, back in the 1980s and 1990s, when London was known as ‘Londonistan’ because, in the words of a former White House counter terrorism official, the capital was, metaphorically speaking, behaving ‘promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fundraisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war.’
Adel Abdel Bary at the Institute of Qur'anic Studies, a youth club in Birmingham
Bary is seen arriving at his family's home in west London in 2021
Abu Hamza (the hook-handed cleric). Omar Bakri. Abu Qatada. Anjem Choudary. Remember them? They were all in their pomp at the time.
And then there was Adel Abdel Bary.
To his supporters on the Hard Left (including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow chancellor John McDonnell), he was a ‘respected human rights lawyer.’
To the security services, he was Osama bin Laden’s mouthpiece: Al-Qaeda’s press officer in London, who had blood on his hands.
We know which version of Bary turned out to be true because he would spend more than 20 years in a US jail for his involvement in the truck bomb attacks on US embassies in East Africa in 1998 which killed 224 people and injured thousands more.
Messrs Corbyn and McDonnell tried to prevent his subsequent extradition to America by putting forward a motion in the House of Commons claiming ‘no credible evidence had been levelled against him’.
In fact, Bary, 64, who admitted three charges, including conspiracy to murder US citizens abroad, was responsbile for transmitting al-Qaeda’s claim of responsibility, as well as threats of further carnage, and was integral to the plot.
He was released from prison in the US in 2020.
It might have been hoped, in the circumstances, that he would have been banned from returning to the UK, given his role in one of the world’s worst terrorist atrocities.
Instead, he was allowed to move back into the £1million council house in a fashionable corner of west London where he and his wife raised six children on benefits and where he remains to this day.
Little has been heard or seen of him since he was freed – until the emergence of that photograph online last week.
The very fact Bary is still living at the council flat in Maida Vale is matter of controversy
Bary is seen in a prison van in London in 1999 before he is convicted for his involvement in the truck bomb attacks on US embassies in East Africa the year before
It was taken inside the Institute of Qur’anic Studies (the IQ Centre), a youth club in Birmingham. The name is written on the whiteboard next to Bary.
The choice of venue was no coincidence and is accompanied by an interview on the controversial Islam21c website – ‘hardline’ and ‘homophobic’ is how the National Secular Society describes some of the content – in which Bary reveals his intention to mentor British Muslim children to give them ‘skills’ and a ‘vision’.
‘Rather than retiring into quiet obscurity,’ the interviewer enthuses, ‘he wants to work with the youth.’
Children, from primary school age, attend the volunteer-led Institute of Qur’anic Studies where they can play table tennis and pool, among other activities, and go to Quran classes.
There are pictures on the official website of students attending these classes at the centre’s Madrasah (religious school).
The 22,000-plus word essay promoting Bary is called A Boy Named Justice: The Story of Adel Abdel Bary. Adel means ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ in Arabic. A more inappropriate name for him, it would be hard to imagine.
Bary is referred to as the man accused of bombing a US Embassy (for the record, bombs were detonated outside US embassies both in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) and ‘innocent’ Bary was convicted after entering into a plea bargain which resulted in a greatly reduced jail sentence of 25 years; he was freed nearly four years early on compassionate grounds because his morbid obesity and asthma made him a Covid risk behind bars.
He is still a substantial presence judging by his appearance at the Institute of Qur’anic Studies.
Bary's son Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, who joined IS, is seen posing with an assault rifle
The 32-year-old was found dead in a prison cell in Spain last year while awaiting trial
There is no mention in his fawning, unquestioning interview – from the Hello! magazine school of journalism – that one of Bary’s sons joined Islamic State and allegedly posed for photographs holding a severed head in the Syrian city of Raqqa.
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, who was 32, was found dead in a prison cell in Spain last year where he was awaiting a verdict after being put on trial in Madrid on suspicion of heading an itinerant jihadist cell formed after leaving Syria.
Is this an example of his father’s mentoring abilities?
When my colleague Amardeep Bassey visited the Institute of Qur’anic Studies to speak to the management about Bary he was put on the phone to one of the bosses who accused him of ‘trespassing’, bellowing down the line: ‘There are children here and so safeguarding issues to take into account’, before threatening to ‘come and throw you out myself’ if he didn’t leave immediately.
The twisted irony of it all, namely that a convicted terrorist had been at the youth club where, apart from anything else, he posed for numerous photographs, seemed to have escaped him.
The centre, which operates out of spacious premises in an industrial unit in Sparkbrook, has previously hosted lectures by Moazzam Begg, the former Guantanamo Bay detainee, a senior director at the advocacy group Cage, which once described the Isis executioner known as Jihadi John as a ‘beautiful young man.’
There are activities and courses for adults but the Institute of Qur’anic studies caters fundamentally for impressionable children and young people which makes the presence of Begg and Cage and Bary more concerning.
Cage was one of the five groups named and shamed by Michael Gove, the now former communities secretary, likely to fall foul of a new government definition of extremism, at least that was before the general election.
In fact, the ‘interview’ with Bary, his first since arriving back in the UK, was trailed on X, formerly Twitter, and was part of a collaboration with Cage.
His involvement with Cage tells us everything we need to know about his suitability as a mentor, if indeed there was any doubt.
Why the Institute of Qur’anic Studies?
The first thing to say is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Birmingham and elsewhere have nothing in common with the likes of Bary which might sound like a standard line inserted in an article to avoid criticism of stereotyping of communities but it also happens to be true.
Even so, he will find a willing and receptive audience in some quarters of Britain’s second city.
Birmingham is the scene of the Trojan Horse affair when a group of conservative Muslims were accused of trying to impose an Islamist ethos in schools and where five highly concentrated Muslim wards, including Sparkbrook, produced 26 of the country’s 269 known jihadis, according to a 2017 analysis of terrorism in the UK.
Might there also be another reason for Bary’s choice of venue?
A director of the Institute of Qur’anic Studies, it turns out, has the same name as someone who is listed on the electoral roll at Bary’s Maida Vale home in London.
At the time of writing we had not received any clarification on whether that person is, say, one of Bary’s sons or a relative or if it was appropriate for Bary to be at the youth centre in any capacity.
The Institute pointed out in an email, however, that the ‘centre rents out space to third party organisations and we take no responsibility for any events they host or individuals they interview.’
The underlying truth at the heart of this saga, though, is that Bary is not under any licence conditions that would automatically prevent him mentoring children.
He could not be subjected to a Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (Tpim) notice on his return from the US in 2020, a power that places restrictions on individuals, including curtailing their movements, because he had completed his sentence for the embassy bombings.
The best Scotland Yard could do was obtain a ‘notification order’ requiring him to simply inform them about any changes to his personal circumstances such as moving home or acquiring a new phone; small beer, in other words, which meant Bary was – and still is – free to do and go wherever he pleases. This is despite the reservations of the High Court judge who sanctioned the ‘notification order’ but who also said Bary’s ‘past involvement at the most senior levels of global terrorism are powerful and enduring baseline indicators of risk.’
To the security services, Bary was the mouthpiece of Osama bin Laden, pictured, in London
Why would he ever wish to move home?
Bary lives with his family, including wife Ragaa, two years his junior, on the ground floor of a grand taxpayer-funded mansion (they used to occupy two-storeys when all six children were growing up prior to his imprisonment) in one of the white stuccoed avenues of Maida Vale where the lampposts have been spruced up with hanging baskets of geraniums and petunias. BMWs, Jaguars and vintage sports cars are parked in the street where Gail’s, the upmarket bakery chain, has opened.
The lights were on in the Bary residence last week but the curtains remained drawn across the large sash windows throughout the afternoon. A young woman from behind the door said the family was ‘not interested’ in speaking.
There is just one more thing to mention here. On social media, Ragaa is friends with a ‘Jay Bary’ who has posted a picture of the family’s Maida Vale mansion block. Again, we do not know whether this is on of Bary’s sons or another relative. But the web address (URL) of his Facebook profile is: ‘jihadadel.’
The very fact Bary is still living at the council flat in Maida Vale is matter of controversy.
His homecoming from the US could not be blocked because he was granted asylum in the 1990s after fleeing his native Egypt where he had been imprisoned and tortured because of his links with the militant group Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) who assassinated President Anwar Sadat following his peace treaty with Israel. Imposing an exclusion order, therefore, would have breached his refugee status and, yes, his human rights.
‘It is a matter of real concern that somebody convicted of serious terrorism offences is being returned to this country,’ Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorism, said at the time.
Is there anyone, outside the human rights lobby, who would disagree with him?
Men such as Bary have certainly been helped down the years by an army of lawyers who have become a regular fixture in the courts seeking to persuade judges to free or relax restrictions on terrorist suspects and ruthlessly exploiting loopholes in the law.
One of those lawyers, of course, was our new Prime Minister who was once a leading light at Doughty Street Chambers before he became Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in 2008.
There is a ‘cab-rank’ rule which, it should be stressed, means barristers cannot discriminate between clients and must take on any case if they are available.
Additional reporting Tim Stewart
