On Sunday 15th July, the Observer revealed that West Midlands police officers had "made up" evidence against a University of Nottingham student in 2008. Rizwaan Sabir was wrongfully accused of "collecting information of a kind to provide practical assistance to a person committing an act of terrorism" after coming into possession of a document for his PhD proposal. An internal West Midlands police report has now concluded that investigating detectives fabricated key evidence in the case against him. Nottingham Indymedia (NI) contacted Rizwaan (RS) to ask him for further comments about the latest revelations in his case.

NI: Why do you think that the police fabricated evidence against you?

RS: Evidence was manufactured against me because the police were trying to justify their actions by giving the impression that I was somehow connected to terrorism. What people don’t understand - unless confronted directly by the police - is that when police undertake a counter-terrorism operation, they are involving themselves in deeply politicised policing and with such policing pressures comes an expectation to produce results that support and reinforce political agendas. In order to prove themselves, police simply invented evidence in my case. The question we must all therefore ask is - how many people have been charged as terrorists on the basis of falsified evidence? One must remember that the Observer revelations only emerged after 4 years of intense investigation and questions into the Nottingham case. In the vast majority of cases, however, where people are arrested as suspected terrorists and released without charge or are eventually acquitted – how do we know the police haven’t simply made up information to bring a case against them? I think it’s important for lawyers and those that have been subjected to false imprisonment to work together in figuring out whether evidence has been manufactured in their case too. An independent investigation into the Nottingham case, and similar cases, will allow this understanding to be formed, which will, one hopes, allow for a more proportionate and progressive series of anti-terror measures to be implemented.

NI: West Midlands police say that no action will be taken against the officers who made up evidence against you. Do you have any comment on that?

RS: Police are hardly ever willing to take action against their own. The entire struggle with this case, and I’m sure many others, is based on forcing accountability into policing, especially counter-terrorism policing, which is unnecessarily non-transparent and downright counter-productive. Since the Observer revelations, various meetings and discussions have taken place, and continue to take place, between the police, members of the legal profession and individuals who are well versed with counter-terrorism policing in the UK. When and if I can share any further information with you, I will do so. 

NI: You've alluded to the fact that there are others accused of terrorism who are in a worse situation than you. Can you give more details?

RS: When I say others are in a far worse situation, I mean that there is no real way for an individual that has been subjected to arrest and charge (or prosecution as a terrorist) to fight in a legal structure that reinforces the power and authority of the State at every step. If you then bring in the revelation that has come to surface through my case that the police are simply inventing evidence to secure charges against innocent people, we find that people are in a terrible position. Considering that almost half of the terrorist convictions in the UK are connected to people merely possessing information that the police and law claim is criminal to possess; irrespective of whether that information is in the possession of somebody out of curiosity, for research purposes or because an individual has a desire to use that information for a violent purpose means that the police will paint a profile of a person, sometimes through falsified evidence, to convince a jury that they are guilty of being a terrorist. Unless these individuals are able to fight their cases from prison and are able to convince their legal representatives and political campaigners to help them investigate their case, they will most likely never be able to clear their names. This puts them in a far worse position than I was.

NI: An atmosphere of suspicion towards Muslims seems to have characterised your case. Do you think that there is institutional Islamophobia within the police and Home Office?

RS: The short answer is yes. It is no secret that the entire counter-terrorism structure in the UK is almost fully geared towards addressing the alleged threat of international terrorism, a by-word reserved for political violence used by Muslims against UK and Western interests. The UK’s approach to confronting this issue is to some extent based on the theoretical and practical structures of counter-insurgency warfare. Such a model views Muslims as having an innate potential to support political violence against British & Western interests which is why the police’s actions and responses target the entire Muslim community, whether it’s through stop and search, intelligence/information gathering programmes such as Operation ‘Rich Picture’ and the Prevent programme. On occasions, this targeting will take the form of financing community projects, co-opting members of the Muslim community by issuing honours, for example, or through sinister acts such as gathering intelligence on the lawful political and religious views of Muslims, such as myself. The point is that if an entire community is suspected of potentially becoming terrorists, then the policies and practices of the UK’s policing and security agencies will be based to a large degree on racial/religious profiling, or more simply, stereotyping. When such approaches are being used, ‘institutional Islamophobia’ is an inevitable outcome.  

NI: In your recent Ceasefire article you've written about the importance of knowing your rights. How has knowing your rights helped you in this case?

RS: Knowing your rights is one of the most important ways in which people can defend and protect themselves against the police. If you don’t know your rights, the police can take away your rights without you ever knowing that your rights have been taken away. This means that you are defenceless when you are a suspect. The first step to ensuring that you’re safe and secure from the excesses of the State is by knowing what you are entitled to do, say and what you are not obliged to do and say. Knowing my rights has ensured – on ‘some’ occasions - that the police have not been able to get away with abuse, or a misuse of their power/authority. Your rights are given to you in order to protect you from State/police intrusion so use them if you’re dealing with the police and other agencies of the State. But before you can use them, you must know them. Learning is therefore priority number one. 

NI: You're currently studying for a PhD at the University of Bath. What are you researching?

RS: Almost all of the government’s policies towards Muslims since 9/11 and especially 7/7 have been based around security and counter-terrorism, so the best way to simplify what I’m researching is to say that I’m researching UK counter-terrorism policies & practices which are targeted (rather specifically) at the UK’s Muslim population, and by their very nature, beyond.

NI: Thanks for your time. We wish you all the best with your research.