How visiting the Department of Justice’s website can make you a suspected terrorist

Earlier this week, Hicham Yezza wrote about his experiences of being arrested as a suspected terrorist, being detained for six days and then released without charge:

Once in custody, almost 48 hours passed before it was confirmed that the entire operation (involving dozens of officers, police cars, vans, and scientific support agents) was triggered by the presence on my University of Nottingham office computer of a … document called the “al-Qaida Training Manual”.

Sounds good grounds for arresting someone, until you realise where this document came from:

Rizwaan Sabir, a politics student friend of mine (who was also arrested), had downloaded the file from the US justice department website.

Yes, you read that right – the document is made publicly availabe by the USA’s Department of Justice. If they think there are perfectly good reasons for non-terrorists to look at this document (and why else put it on their website?), why did the British police decide its possession was grounds for arrest and six days detention? (Or indeed, why had the University of Nottingham put the document on the reading list for one of its own courses?)

Indeed, two other parts of Yezza’s account (from a comment he posted to his own piece) raise further questions about how the police conducted the operation. First is the delay before he was questioned at all:

I was arrested, fingerprinted (a two-hour quite unpleasant process for both hand and foot prints), had my DNA sampled, locked up in a cell incommunicado for ten hours BEFORE I was asked a single question.

When arguing for longer detention periods, the Government has frequently claimed that more time is needed. But if you’re not making good use of the time you’ve got, that seriously weakens the case for needing more time.

Second, if Yezza had been a terrorist, he almost certainly would have been able to avoid the police because:

I turned up at my office on the morning of May 14 with full knowledge that police officers were there, (a fact the police had verified very early on). In other words, they were only able to arrest me because I came to them.

Yezza’s account fits with the media coverage of his case and – if even close to being accurate – raises the question: in its near obsession to introduce ever more draconian powers for the police, has the Government taken its eye of the ball when it comes to ensuring that the police properly handle cases such as this?