3:02pm Thursday 13th November 2008
I liked your front-page article about the schoolboy “terrorist”.
We recently returned to these shores after 15 years of living on Koh Samui island in southern Thailand, where loss-of-face rules supreme and people are known to casually shoot one another over a coconut (it’s true, really), and I thought we were coming back to relative sanity.
At first glance, I assumed the schoolboy snapper had taken a photo of a terrorist in Wimbledon station. On reading the whole article, I had to smile at the incredulity of what Asian folk might call the paranoia of the West. It really is a world gone mad.
My apologies to Master Sabbara’s parents – it’s not their situation that made me smile, merely the extreme of today’s fanatic anti-terrorism coming to light.
I myself am the mother of a 12-year-old boy who likes to take photos and we could well have found ourselves in the same position.
What bothers me is the fact that poor Fabian was made to sign the Stop and Search Terrorism Act. I’m not a lawyer, but I was under the impression that in this country, a child under the age of 16 should not be made to sign any official document without either his parents or a legal representative present. I trust someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but if not, it could be grounds for a law suit.
The police will probably defend themselves by pointing out that if a terrorist act did take place in Wimbledon, and they had not acted as they did, everyone would hold them responsible for not acting with due vigilance. On that premise, they should be searching all schools up and down the country to weed out these Junior Jihadists. Fascinating.
I shall be sending my poor boy straight round to Wimbledon station armed with his little camera; he’s very talented at the half-body shot, usually leaving the head and torso out, and see how well he does.
Yours from War-Zone Wimbledon.
PHILIPA SPACE
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