The government’s terror laws watchdog says six men arrested during Pope Benedict’s UK visit last September were never involved in a plot.

David Anderson QC said police acted appropriately and the arrests were partly prompted by mistaken identity.

The six Westminster street cleaners were seized amid fears they wanted to attack the Pope mobile. The men were released without charge amid reports that a canteen joke had been misunderstood.

Scotland Yard counter-terrorism officers launched “Operation Grid” and arrested the six men on 17 September last year on suspicion of plotting to harm the Pope during a visit which began the day before. Questioned at high security Paddington Green police station, they were released without charge, having been held for between 33 and 42 hours.

The men, aged between 26 and 44, were all North African Muslims and worked for Veolia Environmental Services – which cleans streets in Westminster.

Mr Anderson, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said in this report he had met two of the men, spoken with lawyers and had also questioned detectives from Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command.

“There is no reason to believe, with the benefit of hindsight, that any of the arrested men was involved in a plot to kill the Pope, or indeed that any such plot existed,” he said in his report.

“The powers of arrest, search, seizure under the Terrorism Act 2000 (TA 2000) were, however, in all the circumstances of Operation Grid, lawfully and appropriately used.

“There will be future temptations to use the TA 2000 powers in relation to individuals as to whom the necessary reasonable suspicions do not exist, particularly in the context of international high-profile events such as the London Olympics.

“Constant vigilance is required to ensure that the legal boundaries of those powers are respected, as they were in this case.”

BBC News, 15 May 2011

David Anderson supports the decision to arrest the men despite noting that it was “barely credible that persons who were within a couple of days of executing an attack on the life of the Pope would have spoken openly of their intentions within the possible hearing of others”.

He does however criticise the fact that some of the arrested men were denied the right to inform a named person of their detention – a right which serves “to differentiate the practices of a civilised society from the unexplained ‘disappearances’ characteristic of a police state”.

It has been reported that at least one of the men is considering legal action against the police for false imprisonment.

The men have been deprived of the opportunity to challenge the disgraceful coverage of their arrests in the Daily Express because Richard Desmond has withdrawn all his titles from the Press Complaints Commission.

The Muslim News and ENGAGE have noted an exchange in the House of Commons yesterday where David Cameron was challenged by Labour’s Alan Johnson over his failure to implement the Conservatives’ manifesto pledge to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir:

Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab): On the subject of empty opposition, the Prime Minister castigated his predecessor for not proscribing the radical Islamist organisation, Hizb ut-Tahrir, when the previous Prime Minister had been in post for a week. The right hon. Gentleman has now been in post for a year. I would like to give him the opportunity to castigate himself.

The Prime Minister: It is very kind of the right hon. Gentleman to give me that opportunity. We are clear that we must target groups that promote extremism, not just violent extremism. We have proscribed one or two groups. I would like to see action taken against Hizb ut-Tahrir, and that review is under way.

The Muslim News quotes a government spokeswoman as saying that Cameron “has been working hard” to “ban extremist groups, not necessarily violent, like Hizb ut-Tahrir” and that this proposal will be included in the forthcoming review of the Prevent programme.

In earlier exchanges in parliament Cameron fudged the issue of a ban on HT as did Home Office minister Damian Green. The Daily Express reported at the time that “Downing Street insiders” had “admitted that there was a lack of evidence of law-breaking for such a banning”. It would appear that Cameron has now decided that lack of evidence is not an obstacle to illegalising HT.

You can guarantee that there will no equivalent proposal to ban the English Defence League, which unlike HT has a well-established record of political violence. If Cameron set out with the conscious intention of helping extremist groups gain support within Muslim communities he couldn’t come up with a more effective strategy than applying blatant double standards like that.

It will be interesting to see how it impacts on the coalition if Cameron goes ahead and attempts to impose a ban. Given that the Liberal Democrats’ disastrous showing in the recent elections was due to the public perception that they have sold out their principles in government, there will be a lot of pressure on Nick Clegg to uphold the Lib Dems’ traditional defence of civil liberties and oppose such a disgraceful attack on democratic rights.