Nasiri, Omar

Omar Nasiri (born 1960s) is the pseudonym of a Belgian spy of Moroccan origin who infiltrated al-Qaeda, attending training camps in Afghanistan and passing information to the UK and French external intelligence services, the DGSE. He claims in an exclusive interview presented on the BBC's Newsnight programme on 16 November 2006 that the UK intelligence services were warned in the mid-1990s about the threat posed by al-Qaeda, but failed to act quickly enough. He also claims that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi deliberately gave interrogators acting on behalf of the United States false information in order to encourage the USA to overthrow Saddam Hussein, thus allowing al-Qaeda to use Iraq as a jihadist base. In his book, he claims to be deaf in his left ear due to an accident when he was younger, when he was using a Q-tip to clean his ears when his brothers, who were roughhousing on a bed next to him, fell on him and drove the Q-tip deep into his left ear. While this is heavily considered to be true, because his book mentions how "minor details have been edited or fabricated for protection of the author", it is unclear if he is deaf in his left ear instead of his right, or if this ever really happened.