February 19, 2007	Monday	Safar 1, 1428

LONDON, Feb 18: As the Kingsway International Christian Centre, Europe's biggest evangelical church with a capacity of 12,000, is being pulled down to make way for the Olympics, controversial plans to build a mosque with a capacity of 70,000 on its doorsteps have been taken in hand by Britain’s Tablighi Jamaat.

According to a report published in the Sunday Telegraph backers want the £300 million ‘Supermosque’, in east London, to serve as a reception centre for athletes and fans from Islamic countries during the 2012 games.

The group behind the plans is Tablighi Jamaat whose charitable trust, Anjuman-i-Islahul Muslimeen, has owned the 18-acre site since 1996.

A senior security source said that he was concerned about the proposed mosque, and expected ministers to use their powers to call in, and turn down, the planning application.

Until now, it was thought that planners would rubber-stamp the proposed mosque, which was agreed in principle in a 2001 deal between Newham Council and Anjuman-i-Islahul Muslimeen.

The London Thames Gateway Unitary Development Corporation which has planning powers over the site is understood to support the plans. So is the London Development Agency, which reports to Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London.

Tablighi Jamaat has hired a lobbying firm with a track record of supporting controversial planning applications, in an attempt to build political support for the project.

Indigo Public Affairs says that a formal planning application for the mosque will be submitted in the autumn, possibly with the size scaled back to meet some of the objections.

The ST said hundreds of British Muslims are sent by Tablighi Jamaat to madressahs in Pakistan every year, raising fears that some may be brainwashed. A leaked FBI memo alleged that Al Qaeda was using the organisation "as cover... to network with other extremists".

Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, two of the July 7 suicide bombers, are believed to have visited the organisation's European headquarters, a mosque in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Supporters of Tablighi Jamaat point out that even if this were the case, the mosque would not necessarily be the place where the pair were brainwashed.

Muslims living near the site, in West Ham, have raised more than 3,000 signatures on a petition calling for the project to be halted. They want any new mosque to draw in all strands of Islam.

A makeshift mosque currently on the site has been operating without planning permission for the past five months.