Muslim cleric gets 7-year term for inciting followers

LONDON — Abu Hamza al-Masri, a fiery radical Muslim cleric, was found guilty Tuesday of inciting followers to kill Jews and other non-Muslims and stirring racial hatred.

Al-Masri, also wanted in the United States on charges that he tried to establish a terrorist camp in Oregon and conspired with kidnappers in Yemen, was sentenced to seven years in prison. U.S. authorities are seeking his extradition.

British and U.S. intelligence officials said al-Masri, who says he lost an eye and both hands in an Afghan war, used the large red-brick Finsbury Park Mosque in north London as a meeting point for al-Qaida supporters before he was arrested in 2004.

Al-Masri, 47, is the highest-profile preacher to be brought to trial in London since the Sept. 11 attacks, which he praised in his London mosque.

In bringing its charges against al-Masri, the U.S. government has relied significantly on information provided by James Ujaama, a Seattle man who lived in London for several years and became a confidant of the radical cleric.

Ujaama found the rural property in Bly, Ore., and sought help from al-Masri in 1999 to set up the camp. Al-Masri responded by sending two men from London, one of whom bragged that he was one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards. The two men, Oussama Kassir and Haroon Aswat, lived at a Central District mosque before traveling to Bly.

Ujaama had been indicted on charges of conspiracy to support international terrorism, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for providing money and other materials to the Taliban government in Afghanistan. He served two years in federal prison and now lives in Seattle.

In December, federal prosecutors in New York charged Kassir, a Swedish Islamic militant, with conspiring to support terrorism by traveling from London to Bly to help set up a jihad training camp.

A naturalized British citizen who came to the country in 1979, al-Masri emerged as a militant preacher in the 1990s.

His sermons were attended by Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Moussaoui pleaded guilty last year to plotting with al-Qaida to fly planes into U.S. buildings and faces trial in the United States on terrorism conspiracy charges. Reid was convicted of attempting to blow up an American Airlines flight in 2001 with a shoe bomb.

Al-Masri was followed, recorded and filmed for years by police assigned to track militant Islamists, but he was not charged with a crime in Britain until five months after the U.S. indictment was announced in May 2004.

When the charges did come, they focused on his speeches and sermons over the years at the mosque and its meeting rooms and on materials seized at his home in West London.

A jury found al-Masri guilty of 11 charges — six of solicitation to murder, three of using threatening words and behavior with intent to foment racial hatred, one of possessing audiotapes intended to stir up racial hatred and one of possessing an "Encyclopedia of Afghani Jihad," which prosecutors described as a terrorist manual dedicated to bin Laden. One chapter listed likely terrorist targets such as the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben in London.

Al-Masri was found not guilty of four charges: three of solicitation to murder and one of threatening behavior.

A police raid on the Finsbury Park Mosque in 2003 netted gas pistols, a stun gun, knives, protective suits, gas masks, stolen passports, laminating equipment and credit cards and cash.

Mainstream Muslims pointed out that his following was small, including only scores of regular attendees. But al-Masri still managed to garner large amounts of attention with such events as his one-year anniversary celebration of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Al-Masri's attorney, Mudassar Arani, said after the verdict that al-Masri never had intended harm to the British people and merely had been exercising his right to express his opinions. She said that he urged the British people to take control of the government's foreign policy, "which result in bloodshed and loss of innocent ... lives abroad."

Born Mustafa Kamel Mustafa in Alexandria, Egypt, al-Masri came to Britain as a student and worked briefly as a bouncer. He had a short-lived marriage with a British woman that allowed him to gain British citizenship.

According to al-Masri's account of his life, he went to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to take part in the fighting by Islamic guerrillas against the Soviet occupation, and it was in that campaign that he lost his hands and one eye.

Compiled from Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press with information on the James Ujaama case from Seattle Times staff.