As Londoners recover from bombing attacks that left 50 people dead and 1,000 wounded yesterday, suspicion is focusing on a radical Muslim cleric who urged his flock to commit suicide bombing attacks in Britain and preached anti-Semitic hate from his mosque in Finsbury Park.
Abu Hamza al-Masri went on trial in London this week, charged by British officials with incitement to murder and other terrorist offenses.
But the activities of his followers - like convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid and the so-called 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui - suggest that Hamza's rhetoric may have helped spur new attacks. For years before his Finsbury Park mosque was shut down in 2003, Hamza preached jihad, urging his followers to carry out suicide attacks against British citizens.
"Our immediate duty now is to correct our own homeland," Hamza urged, according to tapes released to the British press in April 2004.
"You don't have to travel thousands and thousands of miles to become a shaheed [martyr] - you can be shaheed right on your own doorstep. This is the best jihad."
After the 9/11 attacks, Hamza could barely contain his delight, proclaiming: "Many people will be happy, jumping up and down. America is a crazy superpower and what was done was done in self-defense."
Labour MP Andrew Dismore, who has pleaded with British officials for years to deport Hamza, said his recorded statements "reveal the truth and confirm what a lot of us have been saying for some time. They show that he is a racist, anti-Semitic and a supporter of terrorism."
Even after British officials closed his mosque, Hamza continued to advocate suicide attacks.
"Seek the way of death; try to do actions that subject you to death," he told an audience of mostly young men shortly before his arrest last year. "If you die to defend your religion, you are a martyr."
U.S. prosecutors have also charged Hamza in connection with a hostage-taking in Yemen six years ago and an attempt to set up a terror training camp in Bly, Oregon.
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