THE FBI is investigating Abu Hamza al-Masri’s alleged links with the al-Qaeda terrorist who masterminded the September 11 attacks, as well as his alleged role in suicide bombings and plots to attack Western embassies abroad.

The name of the militant cleric, who was arrested in London this week pending extradition proceedings to the US, is likely to arise during two terrorism trials about to start in Yemen because he issued a press release on behalf of the terrorist group that carried out two bombings there.

The first trial, which begins today in Sanaa, involves 14 suspects accused of bombing the French oil tanker Limburg in 2002 and planning attacks on embassies in the capital. Two weeks later 12 militants face trial for the suicide attack on the USS Cole in Aden in October 2000, in which 17 American sailors were killed.

Officials from the US Justice Department who are handling Abu Hamza’s case will attend the trials.

The Egyptian-born cleric claimed responsibility on behalf of the Islamic Army of Aden for the attack on the Cole, saying it marked the anniversary of the execution of the group’s leader for the abduction of 16 Western tourists in December 1998. Four of the tourists — three Britons and an Australian — were killed. The same group is believed to have attacked the Limburg.

Abu Hamza, 46, faces charges in the US for his alleged links with the Yemeni terrorist group; he has denied any part in the bombing of the US warship or other terrorist plots.

Two previous extradition attempts by the US have failed in Britain so officials in Washington appear to have “kept simple” their attempt to being Abu Hamza to trial in the US.

The indictment from a New York Grand Jury refers to Abu Hamza making money available to unnamed figures in Afghanistan “knowing or having reasonable cause to suspect” it would be used for terrorism.

Once Abu Hamza is in US custody, Home Office officials accept that the FBI is free to pursue further inquiries, although they must seek the agreement of David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. Some of the additional charges carry the death penalty, but US officials again insisted last night that they would not seek capital punishment because it would jeopardise further extradition cases with Britain.

A senior US legal official said yesterday that he believed that there was “a lot more to come out about Abu Hamza”. Raymond Kelly, the New York Police Commissioner, said on US television that Abu Hamza was “the real deal”.

US investigators are understood to be concentrating on Abu Hamza’s alleged links with Abu Zubaydah, al- Qaeda’s chief of operations, who is in US custody and has been named as the architect of the September 11 hijackings.

Zubaydah ran a training camp in Afghanistan where handpicked young recruits from the West were schooled in weapons and explosives. Only a select few, US investigators say, were able to recommend recruits to be sent for “leadership training”. The FBI says it has evidence that a number of men from Abu Hamza’s mosque in Finsbury Park, North London, went to the camp. Some of those who did train there, and are now in US custody, said that they were regularly visited at the camp by Osama bin Laden.

Agents claim that at least five would-be suicide bombers who were trained at the camp stayed at Abu Hamza’s mosque in London. Confessions obtained from suspects held in Guantanamo Bay, jails in Europe and the US and prison camps in Afghanistan are also believed to implicate Abu Hamza in terrorist crimes.

A computer student from South London, Feroz Abbasi, who is held at Guantanamo Bay, is reported to have told his captors that he was given airline tickets and money when he was at the Finsbury Park mosque for his travels to the Afghanistan camp run by Abu Zubaydah. He is also said to have named others from the mosque he met there.

The Yemeni authorities, who have carried out their own five-year investigation into Abu Hamza, say that if requested they will pass on their dossier to US investigators.

Under the rules of the 2003 Extradition Act, the US would have to make a request to Mr Blunkett to bring any further charges. He would consider them in “very much the same way as the original extradiction request”, a Home Office source said.

The extra charges would have to be extradition crimes and a new assurance would have to be given that Abu Hamza would not face the death penalty.

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