MEGA MOSQUE PLANNED FOR EAST LONDON, TIES TO 'RADICAL' ISLAM

Battle to block massive mosque
Project for 40,000 worshippers 'has links with radical Islam'

A plan to build a 'mega mosque' in east London has become mired in controversy with allegations that it is being bankrolled by Islamist groups in Saudi Arabia. Opponents say it would promote a radical form of Islam. They accuse its backers of not consulting local people.

Tablighi Jamaat, the controversial Islamist sect that has applied for planning permission for the multi-million-pound mosque, has been described by French intelligence as 'an antechamber of fundamentalism'. This evangelical movement, which has gained a strong following among young male Muslims, is a Deobandi Muslim organisation that has close links with the Wahhabi fundamentalist form of the religion promoted in Saudi Arabia and practised by the Saudi royal family.

The sect, which bought the brownfield site in the early Nineties, has sent hundreds of British Muslims to madrassas - religious schools - in Pakistan each year. There are concerns within British intelligence that these trips may have radicalised some of them. Followers have also attended the sect's Saudi-financed UK headquarters in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. They include Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, two of the bombers who struck London on 7 July last year.

Those backing the project vigorously defend Tablighi Jamaat, saying it has been misrepresented because it declines to talk to the media. They say the mosque will transform a heavily polluted region in West Ham, close to where the Olympic village is to be built.

With a planned capacity of 40,000 worshippers, to be expanded to take 70,000 if demand grows, the proposed Abbey Mills Islamic Centre would be Britain's biggest religious building. The largest mosque now in Morden, south London, holds 10,000 people, while Liverpool's Anglican cathedral, the largest Christian church in the UK, holds 3,000.

'The mosque would bring a radical transformation of the local community,' said Patrick Sookhdeo, international director of the Barnabas Fund, a charity set up to 'defend Christianity'. It has called for an inquiry into the funding of the project. 'The mosque is the centre of the community and people gravitate to it. You would end up having a completely Muslim community... It would create a separate district, a parallel society.'

Accounts filed with the Charity Commission show Anjuman-E-Islahul Muslimeen, the Tablighi Jamaat charity seeking the permission, receives donations of around £500,000 a year, suggesting it will need huge extra financial support to fund the project.

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1) Battle to block massive mosque