Abu Hamza the British hate preacher found guilty of terrorism and jailed for life in US
Extremist who preached at Finsbury Park Mosque in north London will spend the rest of his life behind bars after being found guilty of 11 charges of terrorism and kidnapping
Abu Hamza is due to be sentenced in New York Photo: PA
By Rob Crilly, in New York
6:11PM GMT 09 Jan 2015
Abu Hamza will spend the rest of his life in prison after an American judge ruled on Friday that the world could not be a safe place if he were ever released.
Katherine Forrest, sitting in a downtown Manhattan court just blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood, gave the British hate preacher two life sentences and 100 years for nine other counts of terrorism, with no chance of parole.
She said he had shown no remorse and was convinced the 56-year-old Egyptian-born cleric would continue to inspire followers in acts of violence.
“It's unacceptable in a civilised society, it is barbaric, it is wrong,” she said, reading out 13 excerpts of his exhortations to followers to take up arms.
“The sheer point of your crimes is the killing of others, and the destruction of a way of life, our way of life.”
In mitigation, Abu Hamza – who lost his arms in an explosion in Afghanistan - had submitted two DVDs of his tearful daughters, evidence, the judge admitted, that he was a complicated man, one capable of being loved.
"But I do believe there's another side of you, a side that this court views as evil. I don't believe that the world would be a safe place with you in 10 years or 20 years," she said.
Earlier Abu Hamza cut a forlorn figure, all his bluster and rhetoric exhausted after more than 12 years in custody and a long extradition fight.
Where he once boasted of his time fighting in Afghanistan, throughout his trial he has tried to portray himself as a harmless preacher: a man of words rather than violence.
When given a chance to speak he asked to serve his sentence in a medical facility, better suited to his status as a double amputee, rather than a “supermax” prison where America's most dangerous terrorists are housed.
"For me, for my age and my disability, any lenient sentence will consume the rest of my life," he said, acknowledging the likelihood of a life sentence and adding that he hoped only to be treated as a regular prisoner.
He pursed his lips and slipped a stump inside a prosthetic arm, gripping a pen in his famous hook to take notes, but showed little emotion throughout the hearing.
He added a bizarre request that a panel of structural engineers be convened to investigate the true cause of the collapse of New York's World Trade Center on 9/11.
His lawyers said they would be launching an appeal.
He received the two life sentences for his role in the kidnapping of Western tourists in Yemen in 1998, an operation that led to the deaths of four hostages. Ms Forrest took care to read their names – Britons Margaret Whitehouse, Ruth Williamson, Canadian Peter Rowe, and Australian Andrew Thirsk - and to say that the sentence marked some form of closure after 16 years.
In a trial that ended last May, the former engineer and father of nine also was accused of dispatching two followers to Oregon to establish a militant training facility and sending an associate to Afghanistan to help al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
The trial ended a 10-year battle to have Hamza extradited from the UK to face charges in the US.
His lawyers claimed the case relied largely on the incendiary language used in his sermons at London's Finsbury Park mosque, which earned him notoriety as one of Britain's most prominent radical Islamic voices.
Throughout his trial, Abu Hamza abandoned his distinctive hook and tried to portray himself as a man of moderation.
He claimed his links to militants were part of a peace initiative as he reach out to violent extremists.
But the prosecution insisted he was more than merely a firebrand preacher. They described how he turned Finsbury Park Mosque into a “base of operations for the global export of violence and terror”.
It took the jury just 12 hours to find him guilty on all 11 counts.
The sentence marks the end of a decade-long legal tussle, ever since since he was arrested by British police at Washington's request in 2004.
The influence of the band of extremists that coalesced around the North London mosque apparently lives on.
A day before Abu Hamza's sentencing, it emerged that British police were investigating his links to the one of the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.
Cherif Kouachi, 32, is believed to be a follower of al-Qaeda lynchpin Djamel Beghal, who allegedly recruited the shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 attacks, at Finsbury Park Mosque.
