BRITAIN: Officers from Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch in the UK were finally able to interview the fifth July 21st London bomb suspect in Rome yesterday.
Hamdi Issac, also known as Hussain Osman, confirmed he was one of the men involved in the failed attacks during almost three hours of questioning at the high security Regina Coeli prison.
British officials were granted access to Mr Issac for the first time under a "letter rogatory", a legal process in which suggested questions from the UK authorities are put to the suspect by an Italian magistrate.
Mr Issac, who was arrested in a Rome suburb on July 29th and is facing extradition to Britain under a European arrest warrant, was shown photographs of other July 21st suspects and confirmed that he recognised them.
During the interrogation, Ethiopian-born Mr Issac said the contents of the knapsack he had carried on July 21st showed that he had not intended to kill anyone.
According to his court- appointed Italian lawyer, he told British and Italian officials that his bag had contained nails and light explosives made of herbicides and flour.
"He knew the contents of his knapsack and he knew that they were not intended to harm anyone," Maria Antonietta Sonnessa, his lawyer, said.
London's Metropolitan police are confident that the extradition will be handled swiftly and smoothly. An Italian court has set August 17th as the date for his extradition hearing. If he is ordered to be extradited, he is expected to launch an appeal, which will take a minimum of several weeks to be concluded.
However, the push for a quick extradition by British police has drawn comparisons by other countries who have been frustrated by the complex and often slow process that they have faced in trying to extradite terrorism suspects from Britain.
For example, France has been trying for a decade to secure the extradition of Rachid Ramda, an Algerian suspected of links to the group that carried out the 1995 Metro bombings in Paris.
Some other extradition attempts have proved unsuccessful. Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian pilot alleged to have trained some of the September 11th hijackers, walked free after a judge found no evidence to support the US's extradition application.
Abu Hamza, a radical cleric in London, was originally arrested on a US extradition warrant for terror-related charges but those proceedings have been adjourned while he faces domestic charges, including incitement to murder.
However, Britain's extradition laws were recently changed to speed up removals in response to criticisms. - (Financial Times Service)
An outspoken British-based Muslim cleric who left the country after the government pledged to crack down on radical Islamists said yesterday he had merely gone on holiday and planned to return. Syrian-born Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who has lived in Britain for 20 years, left for Lebanon on Saturday and associates said he would not come back.
Mr Bakri said he had decided to take a short break from Britain because he feared the government was using clerics like him as an excuse to rush in new laws and "put pressure on the Muslim community".
"I decided myself to go on holiday, which is for four or five weeks and stay with my mother back home," he said. "I am going to return . . . unless this government says you are not welcome."
Deputy prime minister John Prescott, standing in for Tony Blair who is on holidays, said Mr Bakri was free to come and go as he pleased under current laws. - (Reuters)