"We're going to make your travelling harder for you if you don't co-operate," Aden was told by MI5 agents. (The Independent photo)

(Islam Online) CAIRO – Six Muslims of Somali origin are accusing Britain’s MI5 of blackmailing them to work as informants or be considered a terror suspect and face detention and harassment in the UK and overseas.

“The MI5 agent said, ‘Mohamed if you do not work for us we will tell any foreign country you try to travel to that you are a suspected terrorist,’” Mohamed Nur, 25, told The Independent on Thursday, May 21.

The agent, who entered Nur’s house posing as a postman, said they suspected him of being an extremist.

“I immediately said ‘And where did you get such an idea?’ He replied, ‘I am not permitted to discuss our sources’. I said that I have never done anything extreme.”

Nur is one of six British Muslims of Somali origin who have accused the MI5 of blackmailing them.

“We’re going to make your traveling harder for you if you don’t co-operate,” Mohamed Aden, a 25-year-old community worker from north London, recalls his experience with MI5 agents.

On a trip to Chicago, Adydarus Elmi, a cinema worker, and his pregnant wife were separated, questioned and deported back to Britain.

Three days later, Elmi was summoned by police for questioning about his travel documents.

He was grilled for nearly two and a half hours by a man and a woman.

“I felt I was being lured into working for MI5.”

Over the following weeks, the young Muslim received threat calls from the MI5 agent.

“She would regularly call my mother’s home asking to speak to me,” Elmi told The Independent.

At one night, the agent called him at early morning to congratulate him on the birth of his baby girl, though his wife was still seven months pregnant.

“Katherine tried to threaten me by saying – and it still runs through my mind now – ‘Remember, this won’t be the last time we ever meet’,” recalls Elmi.

“‘If you do not want anything to happen to your family you will co-operate’.”

Islamophobia

None of the six Muslim men, who work with disadvantaged youths at the Kentish Town Community Organization (KTCO), has ever been arrested for terrorism or a terrorism-related offence.

They have repeatedly complained about the MI5 treatment to the police and to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which oversees the MI5 work.

Sharhabeel Lone, the chairman of the KTCO, has also written to Lord Justice Mummery, who heads the tribunal, to protest the harassment.

“These incidents smack of racism, Islamophobia and all that undermines social cohesion,” he wrote.

“Threatening British citizens, harassing them in their own country, alienating young people who have committed no crime other than practicing a particular faith and being a different color is a recipe for disaster.”

Lone dismissed the MI5 actions with the young Muslims as counterproductive.

“These disgraceful incidents have undermined 10 years of hard work and severely impacted social cohesion in Camden.

Targeting young people that are role models for all young people in our country in such a disparaging way demonstrates a total lack of understanding of on-the-ground reality and can only be counter-productive.”

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