Islamist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri

Via Bloomberg:

Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri was today convicted of 11 of 15 criminal charges against him, including encouraging his audiences to murder Jews and other non- Muslims, inciting racial hatred and possessing a document likely to be useful to terrorists.

Al-Masri, 47, a former preacher at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London, was found guilty of the charges after a three- week trial at the city’s Central Criminal Court, known as the Old Bailey. Prosecutors claimed he was a “recruiting officer for terrorism and murder” and used his sermons to ignite a “tinderbox” of angry young Muslims. He faces life in prison in the U.K.

The Egyptian-born cleric, who denied the charges against him, was acquitted of four counts — one on inciting racial hatred and three of the soliciting murder charges — by a jury of seven men and five women. The jury returned the unanimous verdicts after 2 1/2 days of deliberation.

Al-Masri, who lost both hands and one eye in Afghanistan, is also wanted by prosecutors in the U.S. for allegedly supporting Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist organization and trying to establish a “jihad training camp” in Bly, Oregon.

The 15 British charges, brought in October 2004, halted U.S. efforts to extradite him on an 11-count indictment that accuses the cleric of conspiring to supply the Taliban and taking part in a 1998 hostage-taking plot in Yemen in which four people were killed.

Al-Masri testified at trial that he helped fundamentalist Muslim groups in countries including Afghanistan and Bosnia, but denied soliciting his followers to murder Jews and non-believers.

The case against him was based on nine video recordings of his sermons seized by police in 2004, in which he is shown saying that Jews should be “removed from the Earth” and urging Muslims to “bleed” their enemies.

Police also seized 10 volumes of a manual, known as the Encyclopaedia of the Afghani Jihad, that contained detailed instructions on how to make explosives and identified London’s Big Ben and New York’s Statue of Liberty as potential terror targets.

Evan Kohlmann at The Counterterrorism Blog, who interviewed al-Masri at his London mosque in 2002, shares background:

In the immediate wake of the September 11th suicide hijackings, Abu Hamza offered a sermon titled “The World Trade Series: The Believers vs. the [Infidelity] of America.” To a rapt audience, he thundered, “Terrorism is a tool for everybody to get his way… It is a tool, it is a weapon. Allah said to terrorize the enemies of Allah and your enemies. It is a weapon, and it is a very effective weapon. And if you leave this weapon, then Allah’s destruction and wrath will be upon you.” He also has called Usama bin Laden a “victim from the American policies” and a “good-hearted person.”

Over the past decade, Abu Hamza has led an organization based in the U.K. known as the “Supporters of Shariah” (a.k.a. SOS, Ansar al-Shariah), which admitted on its former website to supporting “the Mujahideen… in, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kashmir, etc.,” including recruiting and aiding “front line soldiers.” He has also maintained a close relationship with the Algerian terrorist underground in Europe, and helped them by coordinating fundraising efforts and publishing their “Al-Ansaar” newsletter. While serving as the firebrand cleric at the unassuming Finsbury Park Mosque, Abu Hamza estimated his weekly audience at over 1,200 people: “If it’s too difficult or raining sometimes 900 people. On the festivals we have 6,000 people.”

A walk through Finsbury seemed to confirm his assessment — on a given Friday hundreds of young men, including many European and American converts, climb the building’s stairwells to meet and absorb the wisdom of their eccentric leader. This is a subject of some amusement to the bearded cleric; when asked if visitors from the U.S. often come and visit him, he chuckled and responded, “Oh absolutely… American converts, many American converts from the army converted to Islam, many.”

European intelligence agencies have correspondingly concluded that Abu Hamza is an integral recruiter and financier of the North African sleeper cell network and a major figure in the overall European “foreign legion” of Al Qaeda. Abu Hamza’s own son and godson were convicted in 1999 in a Yemeni court for taking part in an attempted bombing conspiracy against “un-Islamic” targets in that country. Also that year, the militant cleric was profiled in a British documentary by reporter Deborah Davies. One of his sermons cited in the documentary was a call for Muslims to “get training” in order to “get the [infidel] and crush his head in your arms, so you can wring his throat, so you can whip his intestines out. That’s why you are doing training… to rip the people to pieces. Forget wasting a bullet on them… cut them in half!”

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Related: Terrorist training camps might exist in UK

Police say they uncovered evidence of terrorist training camps in Britain after raiding Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri’s north London mosque, which they believe was a global magnet for Islamic militants.

Police said they have had evidence of the camps for years, but it could not be disclosed until Tuesday after the end of a trial at which the cleric was convicted of 11 charges, including soliciting murder and possessing a terrorist training manual.

In January 2003, about 150 British police staged a dramatic raid on Finsbury Park Mosque as part of their investigation into a plot to make the deadly poison ricin at a nearby north London apartment.

Inside the mosque they discovered gas masks, chemical, biological and nuclear protective suits, blank passports, hunting knives, and blank-firing weapons.

“The suspicion of the anti-terrorist branch was that this was probably material used in training camps in the UK,” a police source told Reuters.

“We’ve never been able to pinpoint their locations, who was running them or what sort of activities that were going on, but that is the conclusion.”

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