ABSTRACT

On the evening of 23 March 2009, Nadifa, a twenty-four year-old Somali woman, and her husband Hakim, went to sleep for the night at their home in an apartment block on a busy London high street. Nadifa’s nineteen year old brother, Yusuf, who had been staying with the couple for the previous few weeks, was sleeping in the next room. In the early hours of the following morning, at around 5am, Nadifa and her husband were awoken by the sound of a door being kicked open and loud screams coming from a nearby Àat. Moments later, the couple became aware that someone had broken down their own front door and heard footsteps coming up the stairs towards their bedroom. Nadifa and her husband began to scream and heard the screams of Yusuf coming from the nearby room. The couple then saw their bedroom door Ày open and around ten to ¿fteen men, some in plain clothes and some in police uniform, burst into the room. The couple were pulled from their bed, dragged to the Àoor and handcuffed. Nadifa described what happened next:

This whole episode lasted around two and a half hours, during which time the police thoroughly searched the couple’s home, seizing shoes, clothing, paperwork and mobile phones belonging to Nadifa and her brother. When the police eventually found Nadifa’s laptop computer they demanded to know whether her brother had ever used it. Nadifa explained that the laptop was hers and she only used it for her university work. She asked why they were interested in her computer and was shocked by the response:

After the search had ¿nished, the police arrested Yusuf who had been handcuffed in the next room, leaving Nadifa and her husband in their badly damaged home. Yusuf was taken to a police station, where he was questioned by police of¿cers, in the absence of a solicitor, about his political and religious beliefs. The arrest has had a lasting effect on Nadifa and her family:

Unbeknown to the family at the time, and indeed until many months later, the experience of Nadifa, Hakim and Yusuf was being repeated in the homes of Muslim families across the UK. During the following months, a total of 169 people were arrested in a series of these aggressive dawn raids, as part of a policing operation codenamed ‘Operation Ute’ (FOI 2011). The arrests followed the publication of police press releases containing CCTV images of ‘wanted’ men, most of Asian appearance, together with a large-scale police surveillance operation which

involved tracking the movements and associations of suspects over a number of days and weeks. Another of those pursued by police was 37-year-old Mohammed, who became aware that the police were pursuing him when his photograph was printed on the front page of his local newspaper. Mohammed later discovered that his image had been included in Scotland Yard’s ‘Top 10 Most Wanted’ list, prompting one national tabloid newspaper to label him an ‘Islam convert’ and ‘suspected Muslim fanatic’ who was ‘wanted by cops’. The newspaper claimed he had made ‘chilling references to death’ on the social networking website Facebook, declaring himself ‘Muslim ¿rst before anything’ and expressing ‘support for the Palestinians’ (Hughes 2009). Mohammed, who has suffered mental health problems since his arrest, described his reaction when he discovered the police were pursuing him:

The experiences of these families mirror those of many of the over 1,800 people arrested in connection with terrorism offences in Britain since 11 September 2001, an overwhelming 92 percent of which have failed to result in successful prosecution under counter-terrorism legislation (Carlile 2010). Unbelievably, however, none of those arrested in this series of dawn raids were arrested in connection with involvement in domestic or international terrorism. Nor were they accused of inciting, glorifying, ¿nancing or conspiring to commit any of the wideranging terrorist-related offences that have been introduced in Britain during the last decade. Instead, what united those arrested as part of this policing operation, in addition to being young and Muslim, was that they had attended at least one of a series of political demonstrations in response to the Israeli state’s devastating military assault on the Gaza strip earlier that year.