Tuesday 2 December 2008

Phoning Bin Laden


A radical preacher - Abu Qatada - who has been dubbed Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe, has been returned to jail (in Britain) after judges agreed he might abscond.

So far so good.

Nothing odd about that, (except for the fact of course that he seems to be getting locked up for something that he might do) but what caught my eye about this story was the original bail conditions dating back to June.

One of those bail conditions (there were many) was that he does not phone Osama Bin Laden!

What!?

Don't phone Osama Bin Laden?!

How would the police know if he did?

Would they nick his phone off him and have a look at the address book for 'Osama' or perhaps 'Oz' or maybe 'Bin' and see if he'd phoned him.
Maybe they could check for text messages (also not allowed) to 'Oz' 'hi oz, txt bk plz cul8r. ab'

Come to think of it would the authorities honestly allow anyone to freely phone Osama Bin Laden?

And would Bin Laden himself happily take the calls anway?

A bizarre case all round.




3 comments:

Bill Quango MP said...

"I'm sorry we are not in cave right now..please leave your name and number after the bang"

There is a Frederick Forsyth story where a plot to detonate a super tanker next to a cruise liner {so thats the Somalia thing right?] is uncovered when the authorities intercept a mobile call to the ringleader.

It would be fantastic if some beat copper had just caught Bin Laden..

"The Special Branch had checked his mobile and were just giving it back to Mr Qatada when I reminded them that Mr Bin Laden prefers to spell his name Usama. Well lo an' behold 5 minutes later there we were on the Slough Trading Estate outside the Mecca Travel services company..."

JPT said...

Perhaps Qatada should be made to block Bin Laden's number to stop the big fella from pestering him|

Anonymous said...

I understand he's been banned from phoning Elvis as well.