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Murder, the veil, and a nation that's been terrorised by political correctness by Melanie Phillips - Daily Mail, December 21, 2006 A horrendous crime has now taken on the character of the blackest and most sickening farce. PC Sharon Beshenivsky was gunned down in a bungled robbery, leaving a brokenhearted husband and three motherless children. Earlier this week, four men were convicted of her killing. Two of the gang, Mustaf Jama and his younger brother Yusuf, were Somali asylum seekers with a string of criminal convictions. But it has been reported - according to 'police sources' - that Mustaf may have managed to escape justice by fleeing back to Somalia using his sister's passport and dressed as a woman in a niqab, a veil that covers the entire body leaving on the eyes visible. At no stage, it is claimed, did anyone at Heathrow checking that passport ask him to remove the niqab - despite the fact that, after PC Beshenivsky's murder, his photograph as a prime suspect had been circulated to every police force, port and airport in the country. If it is true that a prime suspect can evade capture by hiding behind a full-face veil, in the expectation that no one at the airport will insist he removes it, this would be a scandal with terrifying implications for this country's capacity to deter or detect both crime and terrorism. Last night, the police issued a carefully worded statement saying there was 'no evidence' that Jama had escaped by veiling himself. Random Yet that is not exactly a denial that it happened - nor would it be the first time. A suspect in a major anti-terrorist investigation evaded capture for several days by donning a burka. And the disturbing fact is that, such is the state of airport checks, it is entirely possible that Jama could have used this ruse. The Home Office has confirmed that, although immigration staff have the power to ask people to remove their veils to prove their identity, this is not an automatic policy. People are generally asked to remove them if they are arriving in Britain but, according to the British Airports Authority, only random visual checks are made on outgoing passengers. But what is the point of checking outward-bound passengers' passports at all, which happens at check-in and at the departure gate, if this is not used to establish bearers' identity by looking at their faces? Presumably staff are too frightened of creating an unpleasant incident with accusations of prejudice or Islamophobia. Has this country become so bamboozled by minority rights that it now makes both the pursuit of justice and protection against terrorism into a joke? Recently, a controversy erupted over the niqab after the Leader of the House, Jack Straw, gingerly suggested that it would be nice if his constituents removed it when they spoke to him, and after a teacher took her school to an industrial tribunal for requiring her to remove her niqab when teaching her pupils. How much more essential is it for the niqab to be removed in airport checks or any similar security situation? Because of the terrorism threat, air travellers now have to run an exhausting gauntlet of checks and searches before they embark on the aircraft. But a number of passengers have reported the unsettling experience of seeing light-skinned elderly or infirm people hauled out of the queue and given the third degree, while Muslims in traditional dress - including the all-concealing veil - are waved through with barely a second glance. Of course, the vast majority of such Muslims are wholly innocent travellers; and equally, fair-skinned converts who display no outward sign of their faith can be terrorists. Who, after all, can forget the shoe-bomber, Richard Reid? But although most Muslims are not terrorist, most of today's terrorists are Muslims. And it beggars belief that while travellers are routinely asked to remove coats, jackets and shoes and do a virtual striptease as they shuffle through security - not to mention having bottles of water and other apparently innocuous items confiscated - a passenger whose face is almost totally concealed from view might simply be waved through because of the paralysis which sets in when British official-dom is confronted by the outward manifestation of Islam. What is really outrageous, however, is that the passport checks - as opposed to the searches - are not even made by an immigration or security official, but are left to the airlines themselves. At a time when Britain faces a serious threat of terrorism on an unprecedented scale, such a casual and sloppy attitude to security is barely credible. Husband But then, of course, officialdom has long washed its hands of immigration abuses and lost control of the country's borders. Which brings us to the most outrageous aspect of this whole wretched affair. For the two Somali brothers were illegal immigrants posing as refugees, and were part of a classic asylum-seeking scam. Their mother paid a Kenyan businessman to pose as her husband so she could enter Britain to claim asylum. She told immigration officials her family would be shot if they stayed in Somalia. But her 'husband' was actually a people trafficker who was being paid a fortune to trade in illegal immigrants. Taken in by this cover story, the Home Office ruled it was too dangerous to deport Mustaf Jama. So it classed him instead as a British national - after he had finished no fewer than four prison terms in the UK. For Mustaf and Yusuf Jama repaid the Home Office decision by accumulating criminal convictions for robbery, burglary, assault, drugs and car theft - before the robbery which left PC Beshenivsky dead and her colleague wounded. Does it not suggest an absolutely lunatic sense of priority to protect the safety of people who go on to burgle, steal, assault and murder? Shouldn't the principal concern have been, not whether it was too dangerous for Jama to be sent back to Somalia, but whether it was too dangerous for Britain if he stayed? Guilty The granting of asylum is an important principle, to protect those who are in genuine fear of persecution by the state. But as this paper has said over and over again, asylum law has been abused to grotesquely and so extensively it now bears virtually no relation at all to that original noble objective. This tragic case grimly exposes the way our continuing asylum debacle protects the guilty and abandons the innocent to become their victims - the direct consequence of the perverse doctrine of 'human rights' law which has produced instead a society of the deepest possible human wrongs. As PC Beshenivsky's widower, Paul, said last night, it is equality law gone mad. Politically correct Britain has made such a fetish out of supporting asylum-seekers, against all the evidence that the majority of such claims are trumped up, that both justice and elementary common sense have been unceremoniously junked. Even to talk about the people smuggling and the crime associated with these immigration scams is to be smeared as a racist, a xenophobe and a bigot. The outcome of this ideological lunacy is a dead policewoman and a family destroyed. The people who tore the heart out of this family were a gang of thugs. But responsibility for this murder must be shared more widely. It happened because the Government has lost the will and the wherewithal to protect its citizens, and instead rewards their attackers. The case is a snapshot of a country that has lost its wits - and, just possible, the instinct for survival.
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