US Court Set to Sentence Radical Abu Hamza Today

MOSCOW, January 9 (Sputnik) – Abu Hamza is scheduled to face sentencing on Friday for multiple terrorism-related offences, and will likely receive a life sentence from a federal court in Manhattan.

In May 2014 Hamza was found guilty of 11 charges of terrorism, the prison terms for which range from five years to life. Lawyers for the 56-year-old Egyptian-born radical preacher, who was born in Egypt with the name Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, have argued that due to ill-health he should serve his sentence in a prison medical facility, instead of a high-security federal prison. In addition to suffering from other illnesses, Hamza lost both forearms and one eye in an accident in Pakistan involving liquid explosives in 1993.

According to the AP, his attorneys said in court papers that sending the convicted terrorist to Colorado's Supermax federal prison would mean "unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment," because of his state of health, and that the US had made assurances to judges in the UK upon his extradition in 2012 that he would not serve his sentence there. However, US authorities say they made no such assurances.  

Hamza was convicted of counts of terrorism including hostage-taking in Yemen in 1998, efforts to create a terrorist training camp in Oregon in 1999 and facilitating violent jihad in Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001. In court papers filed ahead of sentencing, according to Reuters, lead prosecutor Preet Bharara wrote that: "The seriousness of this defendant's offences and the need for just punishment and deterrence cannot be overstated," and said Hamza should face appropriate punishment as a "global terrorist leader."

Yesterday the Telegraph reported that investigators were probing a possible link between a Hamza associate based at the notorious Finsbury Park mosque in London where Hamza began preaching in 1997. According to the paper, "Cherif Kouachi, 32, is a disciple of al-Qaeda lynchpin Djamel Beghal, who allegedly recruited the shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the '20th hijacker' in the 9/11 attacks, at the north London mosque." An MI5 informant who worked inside the mosque in the late 1990s and early 2000s told the Telegraph that "what happened in Paris was the legacy of Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza," and that their teachings have been absorbed by new generations of jihadists.