THE AL QAEDA MANUAL | In Production | English | 40/52 min | HD
Accused by UK police of being a terrorist, a university student fights to clear his name.
In May 2008, Hicham Yezza, a 30-year old Ph.D. student and University of Nottingham staff member is arrested on terrorism charges. The story is all over national and international news: BBC, CNN, New York Times, the Independent, Le Monde…Yet after six days of detention, no evidence is found. His only mistake was to have received the publicly available “Al Qaeda Manual” from his friend Rizwaan Sabir, who at the time was preparing his Ph.D proposal. This should have been the end of the story, but it is only the beginning: in what appears as a cover up of it’s initial blunder, the Home Office does everything it can to arrest him and deport him on unrelated immigration charges. The film follows Hicham’s fight to clear his name, shedding a personal and human light on the current state of civil liberties in the UK