Britain Feature: Police "Made Up Evidence" Against Student Held as Terrorist Suspect

Rizwaan Sabir with University of Nottingham Security, May 2011A far-from incidental postscript to a story that EA has followed since 2008....

Four years ago, University of Nottingham postgraduate candidate Rizwaan Sabir was held for seven days without charge. The reason for suspicion? As part of his dissertation research on tactics and discourse of "terrorism", he had downloaded a publicly-available training manual from Al Qa'eda.

Sabir was never charged and eventually moved to Ph.D. study at the University of Bath, with the police paying him $20,000 compensation in September 2011. However, his friend Hicham Yezza, an administrator at Nottingham, was also interrogated and then held for months, under threat of deportation, on an immigration charge. 

Now the results of the internal investigation over the police's handling of the case indicates officers "created" details of an interview with Dr Rod Thornton, the University of Nottingham's speciaist on terrorism. 

Thornton later said that he merely told police that Sabir was studying al-Qaida and that was never asked to discuss the manual. He claimed that officers invented the statement that he had concerns over the manual.

The findings of inquiry uphold Thornton's claim, finding that detectives assigned "incorrectly recorded" their conversation with the academic.

Sabir said this week: "I have known that the police lied and deceived in order to justify my arrest and treatment and this has now been proven. What should raise alarm bells is how and why the police think it is acceptable to make up information to send innocent Muslims to prison as terrorists. The onus is now on the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints Commission] to conduct a full and proper investigation into this matter."

West Midlands police chief inspector Julian Harper, from the force's Professional Standards Department, said: "While certain aspects of his complaint were upheld, investigating officers found there was no case to answer in respect of misconduct. As is standard practice, we advised the complainant that he could appeal this decision through the Independent Police Complaints Commission. As he has chosen to take this course of action, it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further."