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 upcoming court cases. Nevertheless, as the ricin case moved towards 
 trial, ministers continued to regard the ricin trial as an important 
 publicity resource. In due course, the trial judge was provoked into 
 warning the Home Secretary to curb his public remarks for fear of 
 prejudicing the case. 
  
 No ricin was ever found in the Wood Green flat - just a small number of 
 ingredients for the manufacture of ricin. The announcement from David 
 Veness and Pat Troop that "a small amount of the material recovered from 
 the Wood Green premises has tested positive for the presence of ricin 
 poison" was misleading: the tests were only capable of indicating that 
 ricin might be present. But they did not establish its presence. 
  
 On 7 January, chemical weapons experts at the government research 
 facility at Porton Down carried out more accurate tests into the 
 presence of ricin. These tests established that there was no ricin. 
 Curiously, Porton Down apparently did not pass on this information to 
 the British Government until late March. And apparently the Government 
 never asked for the results of this definitive test. The existence of 
 ricin continued to be proclaimed for over two years. 
  
 OLD TRAFFORD 
  
 In April 2004, the British people were alerted to an amazing coup. They 
 learned how the police had seized a terrorist gang just as it prepared 
 to launch an audacious bomb attack on Old Trafford stadium on match day, 
 an attack which could have killed thousands of people. It was a national 
 sensation. And yet there was not a shred of truth in the story. Unlike 
 in the ricin case, the Government cannot be blamed. The police and, to 
 an extent the media, are responsible for the invention. 
  
 On the morning of Monday 19 April 2004, more than 400 officers from four 
 police forces, many of them armed, raided half a dozen houses, flats and 
 businesses in and around Manchester. They arrested eight men, one woman 
 and a 16-year-old boy. They were held for several days and intensively 
 interrogated. In due course the suspects were released. No charges were 
 ever laid. 
  
 The newspapers, by contrast, had no doubt about what the story was. The 
 front page of The Sun proclaimed: "MAN U SUICIDE BOMB PLOT". On pages 
 four and five the paper claimed: "EXCLUSIVE: MAN UTD SUICIDE BLASTS 
 FOILED". 
  
 Once the story had started to run, it was further fuelled by the 
 Manchester police. Rather than issue a cool denial, they played it up by 
 holding a press conference. The accompanying press release read: "We are 
 confident that the steps that we have taken to date have significantly 
 reduced any potential threat in the Greater Manchester area." With the 
 weekend fixtures looming, it went on: "Greater Manchester Police and 
 Manchester United Football Club have put in place extra security 
 measures to reassure the public about the safety of both matches." 
  
 The police and security services have, very properly, refused to discuss 
 what intelligence led to the raids of 19 April being made. But the 
 police interrogations of the suspects shed a ray of light. One of the 
 suspects, a Kurd, suffered so badly from having his name linked to a 
 terrorist plot that he wants to remain anonymous. 
  
 He told me how Old Trafford had cropped up in his interrogation: "I was 
 in the police station and the interview stopped, like a rest, and 
 somebody, they bring in the coffee and they ask me what you like? I say 
 I like the football. Oh, who do you support? They ask me just like a 
 friendly, who do you support? I say Manchester United. Oh, how long you 
 support Manchester United? I said a long time I support Manchester 
 United, when I was tiny, I was small, you know and all my family 
 supported Manchester United ... they asked me, have you been football 
 ground? I said, of course I've been to the football ground. Two years 
 ago, long time ago, I can't remember." 
  
 These questions were surely prompted by the discovery, at the anonymous 
 suspect's flat, of Manchester United paraphernalia: a poster of Old 
 Trafford, and ticket stubs the suspect had kept as souvenirs of his only 
 visit to the ground, when he had gone with a friend to watch United play 
 Arsenal the year before. 
  
 The two friends had bought their tickets from touts, which meant that 
 they sat at different parts of the ground. The Sun reported that the 
 bombers planned to sit at different parts of the ground, in order to 
 cause maximum damage with their bombs. This claim can only have been 
 based on the fact that the old ticket stubs found by the police were for 
 seats in different parts of the stadium. This information had not been 
 made public, so The Sun could only have obtained it from the police. 
  
 The Kurds I spoke to had come to Britain in order to escape the 
 brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime. Perhaps their most meaningful 
 emotional connection with Britain was a love for Manchester United, 
 which was why they kept the souvenirs in their flat. The Manchester 
 police discovered nothing else suspicious. Nevertheless the police 
 probably viewed the Manchester United souvenirs as potential evidence of 
 a bomb plot. This evidence was then prematurely leaked, through 
 unofficial police sources, to the press. 
  
 Manchester police then encouraged the story to run by issuing public 
 statements that, while falling a long way short of giving outright 
 confirmation, could be read as corroborating the story. Disgracefully, 
 the Greater Manchester Police refused to launch an investigation into 
 the numerous leaks. 
  
 The reporting of this incident was inflammatory and misleading. It 
 caused needless alarm among millions of TV viewers and newspaper 
 readers. It stirred up anti-Islamic prejudice. It ruined the lives of 
 several of the suspects. They lost their homes, their jobs and their 
 friends as a result. They have never received a personal apology, either 
 from the police or from the press. 
  
 MUSLIM WORKING GROUPS 
  
 In the wake of the London bombings, the Prime Minister made a series of 
 announcements aimed at averting another catastrophe. One of the most 
 visible was the setting up of seven task forces to investigate Muslim 
 extremism and to recommend initiatives for tackling it. This was a 
 considerable enterprise by any standards, requiring deep learning and 
 insight, and generous resources. 
  
 But Tony Blair's task forces into the roots of Muslim extremism were 
 given six weeks to do their business. They seem to have met just three 
 times before reaching their conclusions. One of the Muslim leaders 
 involved, the Liberal Democrat peer Kishwer Falkner, told us: "When we 
 agreed to be on the working groups and we were told what the deadlines 
 were, we were taken aback. We spoke to one another and queried whether 
 we were just being set up as a tokenistic exercise, because it didn't 
 seem to me, in the middle of August, when half the country is on 
 holiday, that two or three meetings of a couple of hours each would set 
 right a host of intractable and difficult long-term problems to do with 
 how we co-exist, how we integrate with each other. 
  
 Falkner feels that the recommendation of her working parties were 
 second-guessed by the Prime Minister's 12-point plan, announced just two 
 weeks after the working parties were set up. She says she was: "... 
 completely dismayed, within days of being set up, to discover in the 
 speech the Prime Minister made on 5 August, that he was proceeding full 
 steam ahead with a raft of measures without waiting for us to come up 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)