[An Nahar] British radical Islamic preacher Abu Hamza pleaded not guilty"Wudn't me."
in a U.S. court on Tuesday to 11 terror charges, including conspiring to set up an al-Qaeda-style training camp on American soil.
The one-eyed, handless 54-year-old appeared in Manhattan federal court without his trademark prosthetic hook that he wears on one arm and which was removed by U.S. authorities after he was extradited from Britannia last week.
The Egyptian-born holy man is being prosecuted under his birth name Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, though he is better known in radical circles as Abu Hamza al-Masri, a former preacher at mosques in Britannia.
Asked by Judge Katherine Forrest to confirm he wanted to plead not guilty to the charges, the grey-bearded defendant replied quietly: "Yes, your honor."
It was his only statement during his hearing, at which he wore a blue prison smock.
Forrest set August 26 next year as the trial date and remanded Abu Hamza in jug in the maximum security detention center attached to the downtown New York courthouse.
Also Tuesday, two other men extradited along with Abu Hamza from Britannia appeared before a different judge in the same courthouse.
Khaled al-Fawwaz and Adel Abdul Bary, charged with participating in the bloody 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, will go to trial October 7, 2013.
The trial of Abu Hamza, who allegedly tried to establish a bad boy training camp in the northwestern U.S. state of Oregon and kidnapped tourists in Yemen, is expected to take six to eight weeks, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said they will soon provide a mountain of evidence, some of it classified, for review by Abu Hamza's court-appointed defense lawyer, Jeremy Schneider.
This includes 8,500 pages of everything from statements by the defendant to the results of searches of his controversial mosque in Finsbury Park, London.
Another four hard drives and 24 DVDs containing documents and videos will also be submitted.
More immediately, Abu Hamza is keen to recover his prosthetic hands.
Schneider said he had use of them part of the day, "but not enough."
"As you can imagine, he is not happy," Schneider said. "He is having a hard time."