Mouloud Sihali and Lawrence Archer in an Algerian cafe in London. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
When Lawrence Archer, a 56-year-old telecoms engineer, struck up a friendship with Mouloud Sihali five years ago, he would sit outside the Algerian' s front door, usually on an upturned dustbin, and chat for hours.
With typical Algerian hospitality, Sihali, 34, would pass out drinks and snacks – but he could never invite the man he now describes as his best friend into his home, nor could he cross his own threshold to join Archer on the porch. If he had, Sihali might have rapidly found himself back in Belmarsh prison.
Sihali entered the UK illegally in 1997 and was one of four Algerian defendants acquitted in the so-called "ricin plot" trial at the Old Bailey. Despite being cleared by the jury in April 2005, only a few months later he and another defendant, Mustapha Taleb, were rounded up in the wake of the London bombings on 7 July 2005 and subjected to a deportation order, with the kind of "house arrest" conditions usually associated with control orders. Both men were tagged, put under curfew for up to 20 hours a day, denied access to the internet, and only visitors approved by the Home Office were allowed to enter their homes.
Control orders were introduced in 2005 for people suspected of terrorist offences who can't be brought to a full trial and who can't be deported. Foreign nationals considered a threat to national security who can be deported, are subject to deportation orders, often with equally stringent restrictions. Last week, the coalition announced reforms to the control orders, but deportation orders will be unaffected.
Archer agrees that, despite the seriousness of the situation, there was something faintly comic about his visits to Sihali. After a few months, Archer applied for Home Office clearance to become an approved visitor, which involved being designated a "known associate of terrorists". But although Sihali was cleared of being a threat to national security in 2007 and released from all restrictions, he still faces the threat of deportation back to Algeria.
Archer, who has lived all his life in north-west London, describes himself as Mr Normal. He is as surprised as anyone that he has ended up best mates not just with an asylum seeker, but one accused of being the Mr Fixit in a major terror conspiracy.
If the friendship between Archer and Sihali is unusual, the way they met is even more so. Archer was the foreman of the Old Bailey jury that acquitted Sihali and Taleb. Although Archer saw Sihali in court almost every day for seven months, it was to be another year before the pair finally exchanged words, when Archer and some fellow jurors got in touch with the defendants and asked to meet. "We had read in the press about government attempts to deport them. It felt as if our verdicts were being ignored and we just wanted to show them our support," he says. "But we rapidly discovered that there is no place for jurors in the criminal justice system once a case is over."
The defendants were also desperate to make contact with the jurors, following the political outcry at the acquittals. Sihali, who could have faced a 30-year sentence if the verdict had gone the other way, says: "The jury had believed in me and I felt I had a duty to reassure them that they had done the right thing, that their faith in me was not misplaced."
When the two finally met, they found they had an immediate rapport. On the face of it, the pair have little in common: Sihali is an observant Muslim who doesn't drink alcohol; Archer "went to church once or twice with the Cubs" and likes the odd beer. But for all its unlikely beginnings, what characterises their friendship now is its ordinariness. They go to the cinema and for a kebab afterwards. Archer ("an old rocker") mocks Sihali's more middle-of-the-road taste in music. Sihali attends Archer's family barbecues and helps out with DIY. When Archer went away with his wife and children for three weeks, Sihali house-sat.
Before the ricin trial, Archer was almost entirely apolitical, but seeing the criminal justice system at close hand has transformed him into a vocal critic of the use of secret evidence against terror suspects. "I've become much, much more cynical about the way the government and security services operate," he says. Archer also speaks from experience. Once when he was sitting on Sihali's porch, a team of immigration officials arrived and demanded his name and address. "It was as if I'd gone from being an upstanding citizen to being suspicious. That was quite nasty."
Archer now believes that terror suspects are subject to arbitrary and pointless restrictions, motivated by a desire to break their spirits, rather than genuine concerns that they are a threat. At one of Sihali' s deportation hearings, a government official, known as Witness A, gave a factually inaccurate testimony about him. When challenged about where she had got her information, she was forced to admit she had simply put his name into Google.
Since being released from all restrictions, Sihali's life has at least acquired some semblance of normality. But his fellow defendant, Taleb, has fared less well. Although the police have never questioned him since his rearrest after the London bombings, let alone formally accused him of anything, he is still subject to a deportation order while his case continues. Under curfew for 20 hours a day, he is forced to live in a provincial town, where he knows no one. "He has been dumped on a pretty rough estate, where he is virtually the only non-white person," says Archer, one of only a handful of people granted permission by the Home Office to visit.
It is unclear whether the UK could be forced to change its policy of deporting people to Algeria if the civil unrest were to spread to the country from Tunisia.
In the meantime, Sihali fears that his deportation case may drag on for many more years. "During a time in my life when I should have been getting married and raising a family and having a career, it feels as if I have been wasting my life," he says.
