Life as the spouse of a suspected al-Qaida terrorist
Victoria Brittain
... Adel left for the US, and then later the UK. He had finished his degree in prison and was soon a well-known human-rights lawyer; he had strong contacts with Amnesty International in those years when arrests in Egypt of suspected opposition figures were in the thousands. In 1990, Adel gained refugee status in the UK, three years after he had arrived. Ragaa and the children joined him, and for five years they lived a quiet family life in London. Ragaa spoke little English, only went out occasionally, always with her husband and his friends and their wives. "He did everything, everything, for me and the kids here in London," she says. "And I was happy because he was with me, playing with the kids, taking us to the park – it was the normal life we never had in Egypt."
In the summer of 1998, al-Qaida blew up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 220 people and wounding nearly 5,000. It ended that normal life in London. There was a dawn raid by British police in white contamination suits, brandishing truncheons and breaking down the front door. Ragaa and the children were traumatised. A dozen or so men were suddenly in their bedrooms, shouting for her husband, searching the children's clothes, tearing out pages from any books with telephone numbers.
...
When they were finally taken home, she found her house upside down, drawers open, the front door broken and a metal gate across it. "I had absolutely no idea what to do – he was the one who always knew everything," she says. After five days, however, her husband came home and family life resumed, without him discussing what had happened.
The British police found there was no terrorism case to charge Abdul Bary with. He was charged with possession of gas canisters, bailed, and then acquitted in a jury trial. (An official letter from the anti-terrorism police at the time stated that after nine months of exhaustive investigation, they found that he and the other Egyptian men arrested with him had no connection with al-Qaida, nor any connection with terrorism in Britain.)
... His extradition was requested by the US on exactly the same evidence dismissed in Britain the previous year. It had been sent by the UK to the US as part of the great fishing net of shared intelligence in the war on terror. His lawyers began to fight the extradition in a process that soon took on the character of Dickens's Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Bleak House.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/20/wife-of-alqaida-terrorist-suspect
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