Freedom of speech in Higher Education was compromised once again as two students from Nottingham University were arrested under the Terrorism Act.
Hicham Yezza, a 30 year-old student and recent employee of the university and his 22 year-old student friend Rizwaan Sabir were arrested on May 14 and detained for six days.
The arrest was made after a 1,500-page al-Qaeda training manual was found on Yezza’s computer by a member of staff. It emerged that Sabir had asked Yezza – a university administrator – to print the manual because he didn’t have enough money.
Despite the fact that two days into the six-day detainment Sabir’s tutors issued statements confirming that the printed pages were directly related to research he was doing for his MA dissertation into terrorist tactics, the two were held for a further four days, but surely it can’t have taken that long to raid the computers and mobile phones confiscated from their families.
After their release without charges Sabir spoke of his fear that he would end up in Belmarsh, describing his detention as ‘psyhchological torture.’ Following his release Sabir was read a statement, which deemed the manual an ‘illegal document which shouldn’t be used for research purposes.’
What is ridiculous about the debacle is that this ‘illegal document’ was secured by totally legal means via a US governmental website. Google the term ‘US government al-Qaeda training manual’ and you’re on to a winner.
I did, however, with many reservations, fearing I might suddenly hear the heavy fist of the anti-terror squad beating down my front door.
The government want to reassure us that its increasingly stringent policies on terrorism should in no way dampen our access to education, but if we are restricted from learning about the very thing we fear how are we supposed to combat it?
Instead we end up fearing something we have no knowledge of – and that seems to me a very common symptom of heightened paranoia.
As a budding academic, Mr Sabir is precisely the key candidate who ought to be looking into such research as a means of furthering our understanding.
Although Yezza was released along with Sabir, he was later re-arrested on apparently unrelated immigration charges.
Yezza was faced with the imminent prospect of being deported back to Algeria on 1 June after his 13 years in Britain, but the plans were cancelled by the Home Office as the charges are still subject to a court hearing.
However, Alan Simpson, Labour MP for Nottingham South, isn’t the only one who suspects these allegations as an attempt to cover up the government’s embarrassment over such a rash arrest in the first place.
Protesters and campaigners besieged the university campus as students, lecturers and Alan Simpson himself attended the rally against increasing self-censorship in education with some even reciting passages from the manual as an expression of the text’s legality unless used in an illegal manner.
Not only has the government proved itself irrational and brutal, but the careers of two aspiring young men have now been tainted by these allegations.
If this can happen in a university environment with colleagues and students proclaiming the innocence of the wrongly accused, it doesn’t bode well if ministers win the fight to lengthen the time of detainment without charge from 28 to 42 days (supposing there are any free cells going spare).
This is not the first time universities have come under fire for being asked to ‘spy’ on students and it won’t be the last.
