That's where Omar Bakri, an outspoken cleric who's been accused of issuing messages on behalf of al Qaeda, now lives. He left the UK in august 2005 when it came out that the British government was considering treason charges against various radical Muslim clerics, and then was forbidden from returning.

I met Bakri in the lobby of this hotel two years ago, a few months before his ouster. At that point, he was a leader among the radical clerics in the UK, men who move around London, with their impressive hair and competing identities, like werewolves. By day, they give speeches, write online columns, and visit mosques, coming up just short of inciting specific violent acts--the legal threshold here. By night, they troll "safe house" apartments in the city's Muslim districts, offering fatwas, clerical interpretations of the Koran and the Sunnah, which can either bless attacks or stop them.

Bakri, a Syrian-born rabble-rouser who settled in London in the mid-'80s, is still the most widely known of the clerics. In 1998, when al Qaeda car bombs exploded in front of two embassies in east Africa--killing 212 people, 200 of them Kenyan, at the embassy in Nairobi--Bakri released prepared statements from bin Laden. Roland Jacquard, a French terrorist expert and regular adviser to a number of governments, said that "every al Qaeda operative recently arrested or identified in Europe had come into contact with Bakri at some time or other."