A Muslim preacher who barracked former Home Secretary John Reid faces life in jail after he was found guilty of calling on his followers to train to be terrorists and telling them to kill non-believers to get to heaven.
Abu Izzadeen, whose real name is Trevor Brooks, 32, led a group of Islamic radicals who stormed the moderate Regents Park Mosque in central London and then forced back police who tried to evict them.
Izzadeen was found guilty of incitement to terrorism abroad along with three of his associates, Abdul Rehman Saleem, also known as Abu Yahya, the convert Simon Keeler, also known as Suliman Keeler, and Ibrahim Abdullah Hassan. Brooks, Keeler and two other men, Shah Jalal Hussain and Abdul Muhid were found guilty of collecting money for terrorists in Iraq. Hussain skipped bail while the jury were deliberating and is now on the run
The group delivered a series of speeches from the middle of the mosque in November 2004, which coincided with a night of the Muslim festival of Ramadan known as the Night of Power. They were found on a DVD lasting nearly five hours in which Brooks told his followers: Allah will remove all the kufr [disbelief] from the earth, and how? With dua [prayers] or with some books? No my dear Muslim brothers with jihad for the sake of Allah...So we are terrorists, terrify the enemies of Allah. Brooks said anybody who sought dignity outside of shariah [Islamic law] would be humiliated.
In another speech, recorded two years later in Small Heath, Birmingham, Brooks asked his audience; Are you ready for another 7/7? Jonathan Laidlaw QC, prosecuting, said this time Brooks was trying not to break a new terrorism law, making it illegal to glorify terrorism. But he said he had clothed his message in the words of Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the July 7 bombers who left behind a videoed message. He said he was telling them listen, absorb and follow the words of a suicide bomber. Brooks told his audience: These people have made a clear statement: If you stop, you'll be saved. If you don't stop, we're going to kill you indiscriminately. Now, you take the bus, you take the train? You could be the next target. You could be burned alive. You prepared to die?
Brooks claimed his arrest was politically motivated after he interrupted a speech on fundamentalism by then Home Secretary John Reid at a youth centre in Forest Gate, East London, two months later, causing a storm of publicity. Izzadeen was a follower of the radical cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, one-time leader of a group called al-Muhajiroun, who left for the Lebanon in the wake of the July 2005 bombings.
The Regents Park speech was found on a DVD recovered during a raid on Bakri's home in Haringey, North London, on March 15 2006 in the wake of the protests against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Running for four hours and 48 minutes it covered a period at the mosque between 3.48pm and 10.15pm.
The police were called at 8pm by security staff at the mosque as the preaching began outside and returned an hour and 20 minutes later after the crowd had moved inside. But the crowd forced the officers from the mosque as they chanted leave, leave, leave and out, out, out as well as Allah-u-Akbar.
One female officer said she was pushed, shoved and spat at. Inside the mosque speakers referred to the September 11 hijackers as the magnificent 19 and the audience clapped those who had chosen to answer the call by becoming martyrs.
Mr Laidlaw said the defendants had crossed the line representing the boundary of freedom of expression by some considerable distance and become criminal. He said that in the tape, largely recorded before the police arrived, the speeches became progressively more emotive and inflammatory and insulting in their tone. He added: Much of what they say and believe is deeply, deeply offensive to liberal, fair-minded people. Their views are by ordinary standards, among other things, intolerant, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. If others were to describe them and their religion in the language they use the defendants would understandably be outraged.
The men will be sentenced today. |
[METRO] The man who was initially identified as the London terror attacker is still in prison, according to his solicitor.