Lecturer rejects US terror claims as 'nonsense'

An academic accused by America of helping to mastermind a Palestinian terror group from an Oxfordshire village dismissed the claims against him yesterday as nonsense.

Bashir Nafi, 50, a lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of London, was named on Thursday as a leading member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) on an indictment for conspiracy to murder and perjury.

Mr Nafi has been listed with seven others by the US Department of Justice as an important financial fixer for PIJ in the past 15 years, during which the group has been blamed for the deaths of more than 100 people in Israel.

John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, said Mr Nafi had played a "substantial role" in international terrorism by "financing, extolling and assisting" the murder of civilians.

But Mr Nafi, who has been living in Britain since 1983, rejected the contents of the US dossier, which details phone calls and meetings between him and Sami al-Arian, the man named by the US and PIJ's American leader.

The academic, who teaches at Birkbeck, part of the University of London, and the Muslim College in London, said: "I'm not associated with any political organisation anywhere. It's absolute nonsense." Speaking at his house in Kingston Blount in the Chilterns, he said: "You're a friend of someone who's a friend of someone and that's how it starts. I am shocked, upset and am trying to take it all in."

The 121-page indictment names Mr Nafi as a founder member of PIJ and says he also played an important role in an Islamic think-tank at a Florida university in the early 1990s.

Investigators allege that the think-tank, World and Islam Studies Enterprise or Wise, was used by Professor Arian, Mr Nafi and others as a front for distributing funds for attacks in the Middle East. The British-based academic, who is half Palestinian, half Egyptian and carries an Irish passport, was employed by Wise before being deported from America in 1996. He was described by Mr Ashcroft as being the head of PIJ in Britain and a member of its governing council.

Professor Arian, who was suspended from his post at the University of South Florida after the 11 September attacks, was arrested on Thursday. The US indictment, largely based on declassified phone intercepts, alleges that Professor Arian and Mr Nafi discussed sending funds to activists, using codewords. They were also reported to have discussed relations with the militant group Hamas and to have arranged a payment of £19,000 to support Mr Nafi's work in Britain. The document appears to offer no evidence that Mr Nafi had a direct role in ordering attacks.

Home Office sources said yesterday that no extradition request had been received from America. The academic has in the past condemned Muslim extremists. In an interview with Cairo's Al Ahram newspaper, he said: "There has never been an Islamic moral justification for the use of political violence."

¿ Three Saudi Arabians were given 10-year prison sentences yesterday by a Moroccan court for leading an al-Qa'ida plot to attack US and British warships. Zouhair Tabiti, 26, Hilal al-Assiri, 31, and Abdellah al-Ghamidi, 22, were arrested in May last year and accused of plotting to sail a dinghy loaded with explosives from Morocco into the Strait of Gibraltar.