Posted on 05/28/2004 1:31:22 AM PDT by kattracks
Captain Claw, aka Abu Hamza, the one-eyed, steel hook-handed Islamofacist, previously the headliner at the London’s notorious Finsbury Park mosque, was arrested by police at dawn on Thursday. Anti-terrorist police, who were acting on an extradition warrant issued by the US government, are searching his apartment under the Extradition Act 2003 as I write these words for Front Page Magazine. According to London’s The Telegraph, the street is cordoned off and items have been seized, including videos, documents and a briefcase.
It is thought the US authorities plan to charge the Egyptian-born radical cleric, who has spoken out in defense of the perpetrators of 9/11, with terrorist-related offenses. It is believed that they are using information given to them by James Ujaama, who is in prison in the US.
The extradition warrant will result in a lengthy court battle, although, according to the BBC, the US won’t have to produce its full case to the British courts, but rather simply produce “evidence of evidence”. However, the procedure, which will not formally begin until January next year, is guaranteed to drag on. According to The Telegraph, “Dr Imran Waheed, representative in Britain of the global Islamic political party Hizb-ut-Tahrir, claimed that Hamza would not get a fair trial in this country or America.”
Banned from preaching in the notorious Finsbury Park mosque, Hamza, until arrested early Thursday morning, was preaching his message of hatred and destruction of his Western hosts out on the sidewalk instead – mainly to crowds of impressionable young Muslims born in Britain.
Among those who previously attended his mosque were Zacarias Moussaoui, whom the US has accused as being the intended 20th hijacker on Sept. 11, Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber,” and James Ujaama, who was arrested in Seattle and accused of attempting to set up Al Qaeda training camps in the U.S. When police raided Finsbury Park mosque in 2002, they seized hundreds of documents, including a number of fake French passports and stolen or counterfeit credit cards.
Hamza is already fighting deportation from Britain, claiming that as a British citizen, he cannot be deported. . However, he obtained his citizenship status by entering into a bigamous marriage with a genuine British citizen. The British Home Office is currently trying to determine whether Hamza knew his marriage, to a woman who was already married, was bigamous when he entered into it. Even if he loses, his lawyer says that stripping him of his (non-existent) British citizenship would leave him stateless and would be against his “human rights”. Why he couldn’t go back to Egypt doesn’t seem to have been addressed. Unless he’s wanted there, too.
Nor is this the first time an extradition warrant has been issued for Hamza. He is wanted in Yemen on terrorism charges relating to the bombing of the USS Cole. The Yemenis requested his extradition in 1999, claiming he has been involved in terrorist activities in their country – a charge, needless to say, Hamza dismissively denies.
However, his son Kamal was among 10 British and French citizens tried in Yemen on charges of associating with armed groups, plotting murder and destruction, and possessing weapons. All 10 have been linked to Islamic radicals who kidnapped 16 Westerners , four of whom died in a shootout when Yemeni security forces sought to rescue the hostages. Yemeni authorities say Kamal confessed to forming an armed group in Yemen, but denied charges of weapons possession.
The barely literate former Finsbury Park Mosque headliner makes a fetish of dressing in flowing Arabic robes and looking sinister, using a steel hook, rather than a lifelike prosthetics, for a hand. He claims to have lost his eye and both hands fighting the Russians with the mujahudin in Afghanistan. However, writing in Front Page Magazine last year, Farrukh Dhondy noted that the dates don’t gibe with photographs. There are pictures of Hamza years after the Afghan Russian conflict with two hands and two eyes. Dhondy speculated that Captain Claw could owe the loss of his eye and his hand to careless handling of a bomb he was making.
Given his opinions of the West, it boggles the imagination as to why he wants to remain. Here is his response when, during an interview with Front Line in 2002, he was asked for his attitude to Al-Qaeda and whether he considered it a terrorist organization: “Well it depends what you call terrorism. Now certainly I would call it from the Islamic point of view -- it's a little bit immaturity, and you could say, in a way, abusing the hospitality of Taliban, because they should have allegiance with Mullah Omar. That was not certainly his policy towards the West. He wanted to rebuild his country and re-educate his people. He didn't have the means or the resources for it. Everybody, every sincere Muslim really think that, at that time, Taliban should be left alone. So structurally, the Al Qaeda has been dismantled. But morally it has been rebuilt. You have gained millions of Al Qaeda sympathizers. ... Every one of them is a time bomb”
Although he denies having told followers that it was OK to kill Westerners living and working in foreign lands two years ago, London’s Mirror newspaper came by six video tapes made a private meetings around Britain, in which the mad mullah says to impressionable young followers, “What are they doing there anyway? Most of them are spies. Even if they don’t do anything – if Muslims cannot take them and sell them in the market – kill them. It’s OK.”
He was also quoted in The Mirror as saying anyone standing in the way of Islam would spend their life in fear. “They should always be worried. They should always be on the run. They should always feel insecure.”
We might wish the same for Hamza as he fights being stripped of his illegal British citizenship and deported to who knows where, and as he fights the government of Yemen’s extradition request, and as he now fights the extradition warrant from the government of the United States. Let’s hope this rabid, violent promoter of shariah law in the West is feeling just a little insecure.
"I am Abu Hamza, and I am an insane jihadi who despises everything the West stands for."
"Hi Abu!"
Milner: "Now, Mr. Cleland. With all due respect, you don't have a leg to stand on."
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