Brit-hate cleric Abu Hamza handed life sentence for terrorism by US court

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ANI London
Last Updated : Jan 10 2015 | 1:42 PM IST

Radical Islamic cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has been handed a life sentence by a US court for terrorism-related charges.

According to the BBC, he was convicted in May of multiple charges, including hostage-taking and plotting to set up a terrorism training camp in the US.

Calling Abu Hamza's actions "barbaric" and "misguided," Judge Katherine Forrest said she was sentencing him to life because it would never be safe to release him.

The judge added she would leave the decision where he would spend his imprisonment to federal prison officials, the report said.

Abu Hamza al-Masri was convicted of supporting terrorists who plotted the Yemen kidnapping and took 16 US and British tourists as hostage in 1998.

The 55 year old cleric, who was extradited to US in 2012, was earlier found guilty in federal court in Manhattan just weeks after the conviction of Al Qaeda's spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghayth after the Sept. 11 attack.

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Hamza was accused of aiding terrorist organizations and helping hostage takers in the Yemen kidnapping by letting them use satellite calls by sending men to establish an Al Qaeda training camp in Bly, Oregon, and by sending at least one man to training camps in Afghanistan, FOX News reported.

Previously, Hamza revealed to a jury how he lost his arms while working on a road project.

According to The Daily Express, the former imam of London's Finsbury Park Mosque said he tried to throw a container of explosives away in the 1993 incident but it went off in his hands, leaving him with stumps.

After the incident, Hanza went to UK from Pakistan for NHS treatment and since then started wearing a hook on his right hand, right before the beginning of his journey to becoming an Islamic extremist.

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First Published: Jan 10 2015 | 1:17 PM IST

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