Camden New Journal
Thursday, November 22, 2012
by TOM FOOT
Mahdi Hashi receives a cycling certificate from Camden Mayor Roger Robinson in 2002
MAHDI Hashi came to Britain with his family from Somalia at the age of six. He had a childhood in Camden much like any other.
His father, Muhammad, said he had trained as a boy at Arsenal Football Club and liked to kick a ball about with his Primrose Hill primary school friends in the park at Talacre in Kentish Town.
His sister, Fatuma, recalled fond memories of canoeing in the Regent’s Canal with the Pirate Castle community club, and how he loved his bike, winning cycling certificates from Camden Council.
After Haverstock School, he cared for a disabled man before starting college.
But this week, aged 23, Mahdi is believed to be held captive in an East African prison camp after his British citizenship was revoked over alleged links to Islamic “extremism”.
What happened during his formative years is in dispute. But his family are clear that their son is not a threat to national security.
They are demanding answers after what they claim amounts to sustained “harassment” of their son by the security services after he refused to spy on young Muslims living in Camden. Mahdi’s treatment, they argue, is an extension of the kind of profiling “practising” Muslims face on a day-to-day basis in the borough.
“It started when Mahdi was 16 or 17,” said Fatuma. “That was the first time we heard from these people. They came to him and said they believed he had connections with Al Qaeda.
“There was never ever any proof – just baseless accusations. At no time did we hear what it was said he had done. They said the only way he could prove his innocence was to become an informer.”
Fatuma, 21, also a former pupil of Haverstock School, who lives in Camden, said her brother was plagued by phone calls and messages until he left the country in 2009. A group of his friends from Haverstock School have gone on record to back up the claim.
Before he left, the Hashi family complained to Holborn and St Pancras MP Frank Dobson and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the body which oversees MI5, that he was being harassed by security officers. Mr Dobson said he had not heard from the family since that time.
Fatuma said: “They would show him books with photos of Muslim men from the Camden community. Some of his friends were asked to do the same. They were not just asking him to watch them, he was asked to ring them up and talk in conversation with them about Jihad – and see what they say.
“Some of the faces we knew and some he went to school with, some were people we knew from the Camden community.
"We were for 10 years living in Gilbey’s Yard. But he would always say ‘there is nothing to inform about’. He would say ‘these are British citizens living and working here’.”
Gilbey’s Yard, just opposite the Chalk Farm branch of Morrisons supermarket, is a low-rise estate looking over the Regent’s Canal. It was the scene of the shotgun murder of Sharma’arke Hassan in 2008, and the home of Mahir Osman, who was stabbed to death in Camden Town in 2006 – his brother, Faisal, was found dead in a river later the same year.
All three murders were blamed on Somalian “gang” rivalry and set to a back-drop of low-level cannabis dealing around Camden Town.
“They never found the killers of Faisal or Sharma’arke,” Mahdi’s father, Muhammad, said. “But you see that here, young Somalians are labelled in two groups: either a drug dealer or an Islamicist. Either way, you end up seen as a problem.”
A more recent photograph of former Haverstock School pupil Mahdi Hashi
He said the reason many Somali children had fallen into drug dealing was that parents were not able to “discipline” them like they were back home. He said in his homeland children would fear the wrath of their parents, a “culture” that he said would keep them on the straight and narrow.
But Mr Hashi said Mahdi and some of his friends were targeted by the security services because they were regarded as “practising Muslims”, a term he said had become synonymous, in western minds at least, with extremism.
Fatuma, who covers her body and head with a burqa as part of her faith, said: “I walked past builders with my mum on the way to talk to the lawyers about this case and heard, ‘bloody terrorist’.”
She recalled a time walking in Camden Town’s Inverness Street market when her bag fell on the ground. She said: “It had phones, books and two kids’ nappies in it, and it was quite heavy. So it made a loud bang on the floor.
"I looked up and there was this man, a grown man, he was crying. He thought it was a bomb. I couldn’t believe it. Then he started laughing, after crying, and saying, ‘I thought I was going to die’. It was complete panic.”
She added: “It didn’t use to be like this. It changed with the ‘War on Terror’. I think the media has hyped it all up – they are really putting things into people’s minds that have no basis.
“Stereotypes – that is what is making the situation worse. They put pictures up of veiled, innocent women. This kind of stuff is really affecting the society. They do not realise, they are creating this hatred.”
She called for better education about religion and foreign culture.
Fatuma said that in February of this year her house was broken into and raided by police when she was visiting family.
She said: “They didn’t tell us why but they told us they were looking for circuit boards and inflammatory equipment.
“I have two young children. My neighbours were shocked – they relayed it to me, how so many came. They hardly knocked and broke down the door.
"At that time, five days before, I had spoken to Mahdi. He was in Somalia with his wife. All the questions from police were, ‘Where is your brother?’ They took his clothes, tracksuits – his GCSE certificates from Haverstock School.
"They took my Sky box – the remote. They took books. There was no explanation. All they asked, ‘Where is he? Do you know where he is?’”
The Hashi family are now demanding to know where Mahdi is. They believe he is being held captive in Djibouti after a prisoner there got a message to his extended family in northern Somalia.
They believe he has been taken there from an American military base in Somalia where the US has stationed hundreds of troops in an effort to counter terrorism.
His mother-in-law has travelled to the prison camp but was told she could not see him.
The family told the New Journal they had contacted the British Embassy and various government ministries but have been told they cannot be helped as Mahdi is no longer a British citizen.
A letter from the Home Office explaining the decision to revoke his citizenship, received by the family this summer, said: “You have been involved in Islamicist extremism and present a risk to the national security of the United Kingdom due to your extremist activities.”
The order, rubber-stamped by Home Secretary Theresa May in the summer, places Mahdi in a select club of just nine other British nationals – including the Russian spy Anna Chapman – to be penalised in this way for alleged links to extremism. It is a move that has been criticised by leading lawyers, including QC Geoffrey Robertson.
Fatuma said: “We want to know where he is. And let us contact him. To know whether he is dead or alive, a location. The government must have the answers.”
The family have enlisted the help of the campaign group CagePrisoners, a human rights organisation that fought for the release of its current director, Moazzam Begg, from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
The Home Office declined to comment, adding: “It has been the policy of successive governments neither to confirm or deny speculation, allegations or assertion in respect of intelligence matters.”