Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) — Mohammed Kozbar, director of north London’s Finsbury Park Mosque since February, says he’s turning the former haven for terrorism into a place for prayer.
“We’re doing everything we can to prevent our youths from falling into the hands of radicals,” Kozbar said in an interview.
The Mosque, where al-Qaeda supporters held meetings for eight years, is among Islamic centers thrust into the spotlight after British Muslims attacked the capital’s transport system with bombs on July 7 and 21. Prime Minister Tony Blair has told the Muslim community to help root out terrorists and quash the extreme Salafist interpretation of Islam that inspires terror.
“The proof will be in what happens not in what they say they will do,” said Bob Ayers, a Homeland security analyst at Chatham House, a London-based foreign-policy institution that advises governments. “Changing the culture of the mosque will be a long- term process because there are people there who have been fed a steady diet of hate and jihad,” he said in an interview.
Al-Qaeda operatives who visited the Mosque included Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the U.S. in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; Djamel Beghal, a French national sentenced to 10 years in jail for attempting to blow up the U.S. embassy in Paris; and Richard Reid, a British citizen serving a life sentence in the U.S. for trying to detonate a bomb on an American passenger flight.