Abu Hamza, the Muslim cleric, preached "murder and hatred" to his followers, telling them that it was their "religious duty to kill" Jews and other non-Muslims, a court heard today.

The 47-year-old cleric faces an array of charges including incitement to murder, stirring up racial hatred and possession of a document likely to be of use to a terrorist. He denies all the offences.

"The prosecution’s case in a sentence is that the defendant, Sheikh Abu Hamza, was preaching murder and hatred in these talks," David Perry, prosecuting, told an Old Bailey jury as the trial opened.

He said the alleged offences came to light when police officers searched an address in Fonthill Road, North London, associated with the Finsbury Park Mosque at which Mr Hamza preached until its closure in 2003. Officers discovered a large number of audio cassettes and videos.

He said that police discovered 2,700 audio tapes and 570 video tapes when they subsequently searched Mr Hamza's own home. From those tapes, the prosecution extracted nine which the jury would hear during the course of the trial.

Mr Perry said: "You will hear the tapes and we will hear that the defendant, Sheikh Abu Hamza, encouraged his listeners, whether they were an audience at a private meeting or a congregation at the mosque, to believe that it was part of a religious duty to fight in the cause of Allah, God, and as part of the religious duty to fight in the cause of Allah, it was part of the religious duty to kill.

"The people they were being encouraged to kill, put shortly, were non-believers - those who did not believe in, or who were not a follower or even a true follower of Islam."

Mr Perry said that since Mr Hamza was a spiritual leader, people might imagine that he preached a message of "tolerance, mutual co-existence and responsibility".

"In fact he preached the opposite - intolerance, bigotry and hatred, in particular against Jews as a racial group and as a religious body," he added.

"In the course of one lecture he accused the Jews of being blasphemous, traitors and dirty. This, because of the treachery, because of their blasphemy and filth, was why Hitler was sent into the world."

Abu Hamza, also known as Mustafa Kamel Mustafa and Abu Hamza al-Masri, faces nine charges under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 that he solicited others at public meetings to murder Jews and other non-Muslims.

He also faces four charges under the Public Order Act 1986 of "using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred".

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