The court ruled that the human rights of Abu Hamza and the others accused of various terrorism plots and connected to Osama Bin Laden – Babar Ahmad, Syed Talha Ahsan, Adel Abdul Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz – would not be infringed if they were imprisoned in a special US ‘supermax’ prison.
The move to extradite could happen within the next three weeks – the process has taken many years. Abu Hamza is wanted in the US under allegations that he planned a terrorist training camp in the US state of Oregon and was involved in a kidnapping plot involving 16 Western hostages in Yemen.
In his younger years 28 years ago as a British citizen originally from Egypt, Hamza worked as a bouncer at a nightclub in Soho, London. During the 1980’s he returned to Egypt and reinvented himself as a Muslim preacher, following a fundamentalist interpretation of the Qu’ran.
According to emerging reports, the Queen herself expressed a rare opinion on the matter of radical preacher Abu Hamza in the mid-noughties when authorities were unable to make an arrest on the controversial preacher who had returned to London in the mid 1990’s. “Like anybody, she was upset that her country and its subjects were being denigrated by this man,” said BBC correspondent Frank Gardner.
After the 9/11 attacks in New York, Abu Hamza was quoted as saying “Many people will be happy, jumping up and down at this moment.”
Main image: Imam Abu Hamza al-Masri in Finsbury Park, London, 2004 (Getty images)