Adam Fresco, Crime Correspondent
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Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical Muslim cleric, has lost his High Court fight against extradition to the US, where he faces terror-related charges. Two judges ruled yesterday that the decision to extradite was “unassailable”.
Egyptian-born Abu Hamza, 51, from West London, who has hooks on both partially amputated arms, is serving a seven-year jail term for stirring up racial hatred and inciting followers to murder nonbelievers.
The US authorities want him to stand trial for allegedly attempting to set up an al-Qaeda training camp in Bly, Oregon.
He could face a total of 11 terrorism charges, including sending money and recruits to assist the Taleban and al-Qaeda.
Sir Igor Judge and Mr Justice Sullivan, sitting at the High Court in London, gave his lawyers 14 days to apply for leave to make a final appeal to the House of Lords after dismissing his case.
Senior district judge Timothy Workman ruled at Westminster Magistrates’ Court that Abu Hamza, currently held at Belmarsh top security prison in southeast London, could be extradited, and in February this year Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, gave the final approval.
The High Court judges said that they had reached the “clear conclusion that the order made by Judge Workman was properly made, and that the subsequent decision of the [Home Secretary] was unassailable”.
Abu Hamza’s lawyers had argued that extradition was unlawful because he would be tried in the US “on the basis of the fruits of torture”.
They said that there was clear evidence that torture was used on some individuals in the process of gathering the information that led to the US extradition request.
They also contended that it would be “unjust and oppressive” to extradite because of the passage of time and incompatible with Abu Hamza’s human rights. They said that any further trial should take place in London. The judges rejected all the arguments.
The judges ruled that none of the material used by US authorities “carries anything of the smell of the torture chamber sufficient to require its exclusion in a trial in this country”.
Listed at the High Court in London under his real name, Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, Aby Hamza was the first person to be arrested under the streamlined Anglo-American extradition treaty when police raided his home in May 2004. It is alleged that he assisted a gang of kidnappers in Yemen who abducted a party of Western tourists in 1998.
Valerie Fleming, who married Abu Hamza in 1980 and divorced him in 1984 after giving birth to his son, told The Times: “Good. I am glad his attempt to overturn this has failed.”
She added: “He should face charges in the States because he has obviously become a very bad man.”
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