Hamza will be extradited to US in weeks

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza and terrorist suspect Babar Ahmad have lost their final legal challenge and will be extradited to the United States within weeks.

Hamza’s request for an appeal over a European Court of Human Rights ruling that his
extradition would not breach his human rights was rejected by a panel of judges last night.

Attempts to extradite him date back to 2003.

The decision means the cleric, who was jailed for seven years for soliciting to murder and inciting racial hatred, will now be extradited with four others, including computer expert Ahmad, who has been held in a UK prison without trial for eight years, after being accused of
raising funds for terrorism.

A Home Office spokesman said last night: “The Home Secretary welcomes today’s decision not to refer the cases of Abu Hamza and four others to the Grand Chamber.

“This follows the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights on 10 April to allow the extradition of these five terrorism suspects to the US.

“We will work to ensure that the individuals are handed over to the US authorities as quickly as possible.”

A spokesman for the Strasbourg-based court said: “Today, the Grand Chamber panel decided to reject the request. This means that the chamber judgment of 10 April, 2012, is now final.”

The request for an appeal delayed five cases related to the same judgment. These involve Seyla Talha Ahsan, Adel Abdul Bary and Khaled Al-Fawwaz.

The European Court of Human Rights said in April that “detention conditions and length of sentences of five alleged terrorists would not amount to ill-treatment if they were extradited to the USA”.

That unanimous ruling said there would be no violation of Article 3 of the Human Rights Code – prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment – as a result of detention conditions the five men might face at ADX Florence “supermax” prison.

The length of their possible sentences would not breach their human rights under European law either, the court found.

The judges said that, between 1999 and 2006, the men were indicted on various terrorism charges in America.

Hamza has been charged with 11 counts of criminal conduct related to the taking of 16 hostages in Yemen in 1998, advocating violent jihad in Afghanistan in 2001, and conspiring to establish a jihad training camp in Bly, Oregon, between June 2000 and December 2001.

The ruling amounts to a first green light for US top-security prisons and the right of European governments to approve US extradition requests for high-risk suspects.

The April ruling, after a series of controversial human rights judgments against the UK government, was welcomed by Prime Minister David Cameron.

Bary and Al-Fawwaz were indicted – with Osama bin Laden and 20 others – for their alleged involvement in, or support for, the bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. Al-Fawwaz faces more than 269 counts of murder.

Ahmad and Ahsan are accused of offences, including providing support to terrorists and conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country.

In America, Bary faces 269 mandatory sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, while Ahmad, Ahsan, Hamza and Al-Fawwaz all face “discretionary” life
sentences.

Hamza, Ahmad and the three others are likely to be put on a plane to the US within two or three weeks, it is understood.

The ‘holy man’ from Soho with a dark past

ABU Hamza once appeared to embrace western society, but has since defined himself as its vociferous enemy.

He worked as a bouncer in a Soho nightclub and had a reputation for socialising and heavy drinking when he came to Britain from Egypt 28 years ago. The 53-year-old, born in Alexandria, studied civil engineering and in 1984 married a British woman, Valerie Fleming.

But throughout the 1980s, he slowly began to turn towards a fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran.

In February 2006, Hamza was jailed in the UK for seven years for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred.

He is currently being held in the maximum-security Belmarsh prison in Woolwich.

In 1990, he divorced his wife and returned to Egypt, where he reinvented himself as a Muslim “holy man” or sheikh. He travelled to Pakistan and then on to Afghanistan, which was at the time gripped by civil war.

It is unclear if he fought there, but when he returned to the UK in the early 1990s, he was missing his right hand and an eye.

In 1996, he re-emerged at Finsbury Park Mosque in London, preaching jihad to a young congregation.

From his prison cell he has fought extradition, claiming solitary confinement in one of the US’s “supermax” high-security jails would breach his human rights. But human rights judges disgree.