 Radical Islamic cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has appeared in a London court on charges including encouraging the murder of Jews and other non-Muslims. Tuesday had been set for the start of Abu Hamza's trial, but the first session was taken up with legal arguments, which are expected to continue all week. Court orders forbid any reporting of the arguments, which take place without a jury present. Abu Hamza, wearing a blue smock and with neatly trimmed gray hair and beard, was surrounded by four guards as he stood in the dock at the Central Criminal Court. He pleaded innocent to all charges at a hearing in January. "From my point of view and Abu Hamza's point of view, we don't see Muslims as terrorists, we see the Western governments as the real terrorists," the cleric's spokesman, Abu Abdullah, said in a telephone interview. "Blair and Bush have killed more people in Iraq and Afghanistan than Osama bin Laden is accused of killing. Who are the real terrorists?"
| Good argument, Einstein. Make sure you use it in court, now... |
British prosecutors charged Abu Hamza, Britain's highest-profile Islamic radical, on October 19, pre-empting a U.S. bid to extradite him on terrorism-related charges. Under British law the domestic charges, which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison, take precedence over the extradition case. The Egyptian-born cleric -- who has one eye and hooks for hands, which he says were lost fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- was arrested in May 2004 after U.S. authorities charged him with trying to establish a terrorist training camp in the western U.S. state of Oregon, involvement in hostage-taking in Yemen and funding terrorism training in Afghanistan. The United States plans to resume the extradition case once he is convicted or cleared of the British charges. He faces trial on 15 counts, including nine of soliciting to murder. Most of those counts accuse him of encouraging the murder of non-Muslims but one charges him with soliciting the murder of Jewish people. He also faces four counts of using threatening or abusive language designed to stir racial hatred, one count of possessing threatening or abusive recordings and one count of possessing a document likely to be useful in terrorism -- the "Encyclopedia of the Afghani Jihad." |