Abu Hamza goes to jail, and some Britons ask: "What too

[frigidmagi]

SFGate.com

This week, a London court found the radical, British-Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri guilty on multiple counts related to terrorism and race-hatred,including the incitement of murder. Hazma has been sent to jail to begin serving a seven-year sentence.

"Barely have the prison gates slammed shut on Abu Hamza," the Daily Mail notes, "than the buck-passing, blame-shifting excuses [have begun to] pour from those who for years stood by and allowed him to peddle his poison." Various British law-enforcement agencies that could have or should have done more, sooner, to stop Hamza, the paper suggests, aren't just "running for cover." "This is a stampede," the popular British tabloid reports.

For example, it points out, "Police say they had evidence against Hamza as long ago as 1999, but the Crown Prosecution Service considered it wasn't enough." The Daily Mail also notes that, at some time in the past, "[a] senior French intelligence agent...gave Britain a damning file on how [Hamza] was up to his neck in terrorism. Yet no action was taken. Moderate Muslims begged police to stop this fanatic promoting al-Qaeda. Again, the authorities did nothing." The 47-year-old, Egyptian-born Hamza was the head of the Finsbury Park Mosque in the northen part of London. The mosque became known as "a hotbed of radicalism where men such as convicted 'shoe-bomber' Richard Reid and '20th hijacker' [in the 9/11 attacks] Zacarias Moussaoui worshipped in the late 1990s." (Reuters)

Members of Britain's Conservative Party - opponents of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party - have "called for a judicial inquiry into why [Hamza] was not prosecuted earlier." Why, for example, did the Crown Prosecution Service, one of Bitain's highest-level investigative units, twice decide that "there was 'clearly insufficient' evidence to prosecute the radical Muslim cleric," even though files that Scotland Yard (the U.K.'s FBI) had given the CPS in March 1999 and June 2003 had "focused on suspected links between Hamza and Yemeni terrorists who [had] kidnapped Western hostages" in December 1998? Four people had died in that indicent, including three Britons. In addition, the Conservatives want to know why British police who had seized copies of Hamza's "inflammatory speeches" during their 1999 investigation of the Yemen incident did not share them with the CPS. Instead, they gave those texts back to the radical cleric. But it was those same speeches that went on to form "the basis of [the] charges on which he was convicted this week." (Telegraph)

Meanwhile, Britain's Times is reporting that some of Hamza's rival clerics in the U.K. have told the paper "that they were threatened by gangs claiming to be members of Abu Hamza's Supporters of Sharia group. Some of the rivals were beaten up inside their own mosques, and worshippers were bullied into finding somewhere else to pray - but police refused to intervene." The Times reports that "[t]he Abu Hamza road show traveled across the U.K., urging his young audiences to oust their elderly imams and [to] use their mosques to recruit 'jihadis,' or holy warriors."

David Blunket, a member of Parliament and former home secretary in Blair's government, notes in the Sun that, "time and time again," London's Metropolitan Police, Britain's MI5 intelligence agency and the CPS "suggested that our over-reaction" to damning evidence about Hamza's activities "would [have been] detrimental to faith and community relations," and, therefore, that Blair's government should have "soft-pedal[ed]" on the subject. Blunkett notes that the law-enforcment and investigatory agencies "told him when he was home secretary that he was exaggerating the threat, and that to close the Finsbury Park Mosque where Hamza preached would [have been] 'a massive over-reaction.'" (CIted in the Scotsman)