He attended, of course, the notorious Finsbury Park Mosque. In Onward Muslim Soldiers I show the hollowness of the common idea that the jihad impulse is just an expression of nationalism by exploring the internationalist character of the jihad movement: Saudis in Afghanistan, Afghans in Bosnia, etc. This is another indication of that fact. It wasn’t just “Arabs,” as was widely reported, who are in Chechnya (and Beslan). Any radical Muslim could have been there. The movement is ideological, not racial or nationalistic.
From The Observer, with thanks to Twostellas:
A member of the group responsible for the Beslan school massacre last month is a British citizen who attended the infamous Finsbury Park mosque in north London, The Observer can reveal.
Two other members of the group, loyal to Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, are also believed to have been active in the UK until less than three years ago. They are suspected of taking part in the raid on the school in which 300 people, half of them children, died.Russian security sources described Kamel Rabat Bouralha, 46 years old and the oldest of the three, as a ‘key aide’ of Basayev, who has a £5.5 million price on his head. Basayev has boasted of training the men who took control of the school and wired it with explosives. Investigators believe that the three men, all Algerian-born, travelled to Chechnya from London to take part in fighting there in 2001.