The Secrets of a Mosque : Does a little corner of north London have links to a wide world of terror?(Reda Hassaine)(Brief Article)

Reda Hassaine fancies himself a spy. Like the terrorists who struck at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he has been undercover for half a decade, living a nondescript and outwardly unremarkable life, except perhaps in his own imagination. Rather than perpetrate terror, however, he dreams of stopping it. His target: a mosque on a traffic-choked corner of north London. Except for its golden dome, the building in Finsbury Park bears little resemblance to any of the more than 1,000 other mosques in Britain. With blacked-out windows and lofty walls, it looks more like a citadel--an impression reinforced by the Metropolitan Police vehicles that have been camped outside since Sept. 11.

To Hassaine, the mosque has looked nefarious for years. He listened with other Muslim men as the cleric Abu Hamza al-Mazri, who preaches most Fridays, expressed solidarity with Osama bin Laden. Hassaine was there in 1999 when Abu Hamza's son Mohammed Kamel Mustapha and a stepson, Mohsen Ghailan, were convicted in Yemen of attempting to bomb the only Christian church in Aden, as well as a hotel and the British Consulate. He was there when Djamel Beghal allegedly recruited fighters for the bin Laden-linked extremist group Takfir- wal-Hijra (Anathema and Exile). And he was there when Zain al Abidin allegedly drafted young Muslims into combat training provided by a company called Sakina Security. The vast majority of the Muslims he mixed with at the mosque were too busy earning a living and caring for their families to engage in shadowy activities. But others had different aspirations. Some people at the mosque, Hassaine told NEWSWEEK, "have one foot in the mosque and the other in the terrorist mafias."

So Hassaine was not surprised when, after Sept. 11, the Finsbury Park mosque was transformed into a landmark on the world's newly drawn terror map. British police arrested Zain al Abidin. The French authorities released new information alleging that Djamel Beghal, who was arrested in Dubai last July, was plotting a series of terrorist attacks across Europe, including flying an explosives-laden helicopter into the U.S. Embassy in Paris. As for Abu Hamza, rather than condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he has spun conspiracy theories about them. The guilty party: Israel.

Today Hassaine is a bespectacled Algerian journalist ...