Gee, such a swell character, why would anyone want to deport him?Yasir al-Sirri is exactly the sort of man the British government hopes to be able to expel with its new, tougher deportation policy: He keeps very dubious company and the police are sure he is up to something, but have not been able to pin anything on him or put him on trial.
In Egypt, Mr. Sirri is thought to have been a leader of the radical "Gama'a Islamiya" group, and was sentenced him to death for his alleged role in an assassination attempt against the prime minister. But British judges have refused to extradite him to Cairo, citing weak evidence. Sirri claims he had nothing to do with the plot. He did, though, have ties in those days with Ayman al-Zawahiri, now Al Qaeda's second-in-command. And US authorities want him for carrying messages for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life term for trying to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.
Sirri was held in Belmarsh prison in London for eight months for providing a letter of journalistic accreditation to the two men who assassinated the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud in 2001. But a British court finally decided he had been an unwitting accomplice in the affair, and let him go. Sirri insists that "I did nothing illegal in this country and I have not broken any law in this country." Islamic law, he adds, demands that "anyone who arrives here under asylum cannot do anything against this country. Tony Blair is just using [the London bombings on] 7/7 as an excuse to carry out his agenda."