Abu Hamza pleads not guilty as he finally faces court in US

RADICAL cleric Abu Hamza has pleaded not guilty in New York to charges that he conspired to set up a terrorist training camp in the United States.

Hamza appeared in the Manhattan Federal Court yesterday.

On Saturday, two of the suspected terrorists extradited from England with Hamza made their first appearance before a different New York judge who will oversee their trial.

Khaled al-Fawwaz and Adel Abdul Bary are charged in connection with a plot to blow up US embassies in Africa. The attacks killed 224 people. They were indicted in a case that also charged Osama bin Laden. Both pleaded not guilty. The judge yesterday set their trial date for October next year.

US District Judge Katherine B Forrest set a trial date of 26 August, 2013, for Hamza, who is also accused of helping abduct 16 hostages, two of them American tourists, in Yemen in 1998.

Hamza, indicted under the name Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, became well known in the 1990s as his mosque in Finsbury Park, London, became a training ground for extremist Islamists, including 11 September, 2001 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and “shoe bomber” Richard Reid.