Portrait of the week | 3 April 2004

Seven hundred police made 24 simultaneous raids around London, seizing half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in Hanwell, west London, arresting two men in Uxbridge, one in Ilford, one in Horley, one in Slough and three in Crawley — all British Muslims of Pakistani descent, aged between 17 and 32. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, suspended immigration from Romania and Bulgaria in a scandal involving immigration checks. First Miss Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister, was found to have cleared backlogs by letting through unchecked applications from people already in Britain. Then the British consul in Bucharest was suspended after informing Mr David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, that immigration staff in Britain were ignoring letters from diplomats declaring that certain applications from Bulgaria and Romania were supported by forged documents; an application from a ‘roofer’ was approved even though he had one leg. A Foreign Office official had warned in November 2002 of ‘an organised scam’ in Bucharest.