Portrait of the Week – 23 April 2005

Kamel Bourgass was sentenced to 17 years in prison for conspiring, with one named fellow terrorist and others unnamed, to cause a ‘public nuisance’, a common law offence said by the Crown in this case to have involved plotting to use poisons to cause ‘disruption, fear and injury’. Bourgass, an Algerian, had been an ‘illegal absconder’ since August 2001 when his application for asylum was rejected. Unknown to the jury, he was serving a life sentence for the murder with a knife of Detective Constable Stephen Oake during an anti-terrorist operation in Manchester two years ago. Inflation rose to 1.9 per cent. Some 5,000 workers at the MG Rover factory at Longbridge, Birmingham, finally lost their jobs when the government failed to persuade the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation to take on the enterprise, which had been in administration for a week. A High Court judge agreed to hear an application from Mr John Hemming, the deputy leader of Birmingham City Council, for judicial review of the general election because of the possibility of postal-voting fraud.