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August 28, 2007

Islamism: James Ujaama & Abu Hamza - Part 2 of 3

This article by Adrian Morgan (Giraldus Cambrensis of Western Resistance) appeared earlier today in Family Security Matters and is reproduced with their permission.

Why Won't James Ujaama Testify Against Abu Hamza?
(Part Two of Three)

The Finsbury Park Mosque is located at 7-11 St Thomas' Road in N4, north London. It lies along the 106 bus route, not far from Highbury Barn soccer stadium, home turf of the Arsenal team. The five storey building cost 8 million (nearly $16 million) to construct. Almost half of the construction costs were met by King Fahd of Sauid Arabia. The notion for constructing such a mosque had apparently been originally suggested by Prince Charles, a renowned supporter of all things Islamic. The mosque was officially opened in 1988. It was registered with the UK Charities Commission on August 16, 1988 as the North London Central Mosque (No: 299884).

The exact date at which Abu Hamza arrived at Finsbury Park Mosque has been disputed. He arrived either in late 1996 or in the following year. His arrival pushed the mosque into turmoil. Even during the 1980s Hamza had been reported to the police by several mosques for his bullying behavior. One of the trustees of Finsbury Park Mosque was Abdul Kadir Barkullah. He complained that he and others had reported assaults and extremist activities at the mosque on seven occasions. The police had done nothing to intervene.

Hamza was born in Alexandria, Egypt on April 15, 1958, as Mustafa Kamel Moustafa. He had entered the UK as a student in 1979, and in 1980 had married Valerie Traverso. He had worked as a bouncer and had divorced Traverso in 1984 after gaining official "leave to remain" in the UK. He married for a second time in Ooctober, 1984. The wedding to Nadjet Chaffe was a Muslim ceremony. Nadjet Kamel Mostafa now lives at his spacious home in Aldbourne Road in Shepherds Bush, west London, with Hamza's seven children. Hamza gained full British citizenship on April 28, 1986.

Between the start of his second marriage and his arrival at Finsbury Park Mosque, Hamza developed an interest in extreme radicalism. Sean O'Neill and Daniel McGrory, authors of The Suicide Factory maintain that shortly before his divorce from his first wife, she discovered he had a lover, and threatened to leave him. Traverso said: "He swore that he would never do it again. He was going to be religious, he was going to pray and ask for God's help." Traverso's divorce from her first husband did not take place until July 1982 so Hamza's first marriage, which led to his residency permit and ultimately his citizenship, was bigamous.

In 1987, while on a trip to Mecca to perform the Hajj pilgrimage, Hamza met Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, leader of the Afghan Mujahideen, and mentor to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 1991, Hamza left to join the Afghan mujahideen in their fight with the Soviets. In 1995 he also traveled to Bosnia to join the mujahideen in the final stages of the war that ended in November 1995. In both countries, he came into contact with violent Islamists from across the Muslim world. Afghanistan had numerous Saudi, Uzbek, north African, Pakistani, Indonesian and Chechen nationals fighting with the local mujahideen (who would later become the Taliban).

In Bosnia, President Alija Izetbegovic had invited mujahideen to fight Serbs. The late president has been accused of being paid by Al Qaeda. Many Mujahideen who arrived in Bosnia at his invitation have remained and now cause problems for the indigenous moderate Muslims.

When Hamza had left Britain for Afghanistan, he still had both eyes and both hands. Upon his return both hands and one eye were missing. He boasted that he had lost these while heroically clearing mines in Afghanistan. It had long been rumored that he had been injured when a bomb he had been making had exploded. The rumor was confirmed in 2006 by Omar Nasiri, a Moroccan Islamist who became a spy for western intelligence.

At the Darunta training camp in Afghanistan, which was blown up by US forces on October 12, 2001, Nasiri attended a lesson in explosives manufacture. The tutor, Assad Allah, recounted how one former student had allowed his recipe for nitroglycerine to overheat. Instead of plunging the mixture into an adjacent sink full of ice, the student had carried it outside. It blew up, ripping off the student's hands and blinding him in one eye. When asked if the student survived, Assad Allah said: "Yes. He lives in London now, and preaches in the mosques. His name is Abu Hamza." Al Qaeda sent Nasiri to London, where he met Hamza. When he mentioned the nitroglycerine incident to Hamza, the preacher whispered: "Brother, please don't share that story with anyone."

Before using his band of Islamist thugs to take over as the imam at Finsbury Park Mosque, Hamza had been a preacher at a mosque in Luton, Bedfordshire. Luton had a strong contingent of Al-Muhajiroun, the Islamist group set up in 1996 by Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed. This group comprised the more radical members of British Hizb ut-Tahrir, which Bakri had founded in 1986. Bakri was a friend of Hamza, and there was a confluence of the membership of Al Muhajiroun and Hamza's group, the Supporters of Sharia. From late 1998, Al Muhajiroun ran a pipeline from London to Pakistan, where Islamists would travel up to the borderlands near Afghanistan, to become members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Before the events of 9/11, Bakri and Hamza were both treated by the UK media as comical figures, but the reality appears far different. Al Muhajiroun members went on to commit acts of terrorism outside of Britain, and two Al Muhajiroun associates - Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer - were part of the four-man cell that carried out the 7/7 London Transport bombings of July 7, 2005, killing 52 people. Khan and Tanweer had visited the Finsbury Park Mosque to hear Hamza speak, as had another member of their cell called Jermaine Lindsay. Hussain Osman, Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yassin Omar, three of the four individuals who were convicted of trying to reproduce the 7/7 attacks exactly two weeks later, were known to have been regular attendees at the mosque.

At Finsbury Park Mosque, the congregation had become divided into two camps when Hamza arrived - those who mainly came from north Africa and those who were of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origins. Under Hamza, with his calls for armed jihad, moderate Muslims were driven away, and the congregation consisted of extremists from north Africa and the Indian subcontinent mixing with converts to radical Islam, many of whom were black. They shared Hamza's vision of an international war of jihad against the infidels. Richard Reid, the "shoebomber" who tried to blow up a plane bound from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001 was a worshipper at the mosque. Sajid Badat, who knew Reid and wanted to commit his own "shoebombing", had visited the mosque during Hamza's rule. Badat, from Gloucester, was sentenced to 13 years' jail on April 26, 2005.

Among the extremists of north African origin were individuals such as Zacarias Moussaoui, the Moroccan/French terrorist who had been involved in the plot for the 9/11 attacks. Another was Kamel Bourgass from Algeria, who had stayed at the mosque and had used mosque facilities to reproduce his recipes for poisons. Killer of a British policeman, Bourgass had intended to plant toxins at the Heathrow Express rail link.

Three individuals from Algeria who are believed to have attended the mosque went on to become involved in the siege of the school in Beslan, in which 170 children died on September 1, 2004. Osman Larussi and Yacine Benalia died inside the school. Kamel Rabat Bouralha was suspected to have assisted Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev in the planning of the Beslan massacre. He was arrested by Russian authorities shortly after the massacre. He had frequently visited the Finsbury Park mosque in 2000.

Nizar Trabelsi was a former footballer from Tunisia who frequented the mosque. On September 30, 2003 he was jailed at a Belgian court for 10 years. He had plotted to detonate a car bomb at Belgium's Kleine Brogel NATO air base, where US soldiers were ensconced. His arrest in 2001 had led to the recovery of a large cache of explosives hidden in a restaurant.

An associate of Trabelsi who also attended Finsbury Park Mosque was Djamel Beghal, who had been born in Algeria in 1965. He had a terror network of about 20 individuals in Europe and Canada, and is thought to have been Al Qaeda's operations manager in Europe. On March 15, 2005, he was sentenced in Paris to 10 years' jail for plotting to blow up the US Embassy in Paris.

Apparently Nizar Trabelsi had been the suicide bomber chosen to commit the attack. The prosecution had maintained that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, where Beghal had attended Al Qaeda training camps in 2001. Beghal used the mosque to recruit for his group Takfir-wal-Hijra. Kamel Daoudi, who was sentenced to nine years for the embassy bomb plot, also frequented Finsbury Park Mosque.

Abu Doha, who was a frequent visitor to Finsbury Park Mosque, is the alias of Rachid Boukhalfa, (also known as Abou Doha, Amar Makhlulif, the "Doctor", Didier Ajuelos, Dr Haider or Rachid Kefflous). He is suspected of being the mastermind behind the Millennium bomb plot - where Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) had been targeted for attack on New Year's Eve, 1999. Abu Doha had been arrested at Heathrow airport in February 2001 on his way to Jeddah and has subsequently fought extradition requests from the United States. Doha is also suspected by Italian antiterrorist police of being linked with a plan to blow up Strasbourg Christmas Market and also Strasbourg Cathedral. His phone records showed he had been in contact with an al-Qaeda cell in Milan. He establisheds an Al Qaeda terror training camp, the Khalden, in Afghanistan.

Algerian-born Abu Doha was a senior member of the Al Qaeda-linked Algerian terror group GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour Prédication et Combat or Salalfist Group for Preaching and Combat). In September 2006, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's deputy, announced that GSPC had officially joined Al Qaeda. After Abu Doha's arrest, another of his associates from Finsbury Park Mosque, Rabah Khadri, (aka "Toufik") took over his operations. Khadri was arrested in London in November 2002 and charged with plotting a bomb attack on the London Underground. He was extradited to France, where he had been convicted of the Strasbourg plot in 2000, on June 22, 2006.

Under Hamza, the mosque served as a center for international terrorism. On its premises, Islamists would undergo "terror training" involving Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles in the mosque's basement. The mosque had been used to provide false documentation both to terrorists entering the country and those leaving to commit jihad abroad, states one report. Hamza's reign came to an end at the mosque when it was raided on January 20, 2003. At the time Iqbal Sacranie, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was more concerned about whether the police took off their shoes in the raid, rather than what they found inside. He told the BBC: "One needs to be reassured as to what sort of clothing and footwear that was used."

Only after Hamza was convicted on February 7, 2006 of "soliciting murder" was it announced that police had found terror-related items hidden inside the mosque during the 2003 raid. These items included CS gas, three starting pistols which could be adapted to fire live rounds, a stun gun, knives, and chemical and nuclear protective suits. Hidden in the ceiling were dozens of forged documents, including fake UK passports.

Between July 1999 and November 2000, an Algerian Muslim named Reda Hassaine was paid by MI5 to "infiltrate" the mosque. He said: "I told them Abu Hamza was brainwashing people and sending them to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, that he was preaching jihad and murder and that he was involved in the provision of false passports. I told them he was a chief terrorist. The MI5 officer told me Abu Hamza was harmless and that MI5 thought he was a clown."

During his trial testimony, Abu Hamza confirmed that MI5 did not view him as a threat to British interests. He affirmed that he had spoken to MI5 and police Special Branch on numerous occasions. He said: "They told me they are watching so many groups, there was no suggestion I was singled out. It was Londonistan, not because of me, because of Government policy." Later they warned him that he was "walking on a tightrope". He continued: "They said you have freedom of speech, you don't have to worry as long as we don't see blood on the street. They said until now there is no law against those who commit offenses outside England - resistance - but it will come."

It is a sad fact that until the Terrorism Act of 2000, which did not come into force until February 19, 2001, Britain allowed jihadists to legally plot murder and destruction abroad. At least 16 countries have been affected by terrorism exported from Britain. The December 1998 kidnapping in Yemen of 16 hostages, which Hamza appears to have arranged, cost the lives of four hostages. Andrew Thirsk was Australian. Margaret Whitehouse, Ruth Williams and Peter Rowe were all British citizens.

James Ujaama and "Londonistan"

It is not clear how long James Ujaama spent in "Londonistan". He first arrived in 1996, and took up Hamza's extreme form of Islam. As well as being closely linked with Abu Hamza, he was also associated with Abdullah el-Faisal, who was jailed on March 7, 2003 for soliciting murder.

According to federal officalsUjaama worked as the webmaster on the website for Abu Hamza's Islamist group, the "Supporters of Sharia" from around 2000 through 2001. In this, Ujaama was sometimes assisted by a young man from Croydon called Feroz Abbasi.

The original Supporters of Sharia (SOS) website has long since vanished, despite Hamza's followers posting announcements up until his 2004 arrest. Some of the original messages of hate and violence against Western nations have been archived. The United States is referred to in SOS documents as the "United Snakes of America". James Ujaama was no stranger to anti-American rhetoric. At the time of his arrest he had been running his own website called StopAmerica.org.

The SOS website carried Abu Hamza's statements, including calls for the overthrow of the Yemeni government.

In November 2000, according to US officials, Hamza asked a co-conspirator, a U.S. citizen, to escort another co-conspirator from London to a jihad training camp in Afghanistan operated by a "front-line commander." The two "co-conspirators" were James Ujaama, and Feroz Abassi, whom he escorted. The intention had been for the purposes of "arranging safehouses and lodging in Pakistan and safe passage and transport into Afghanistan." Abbasi, accompanied by Ujaama, set off for Afghanistan in December of 2000. Abbasi went on to train in the Khalden Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, which had been set up by another Finsbury Park Mosque regular, Abu Doha. Later Abassi would be captured by US forces while fighting with the Taliban, and spent time in Camp Delta at Guantanamo until his release in 2005.

The details of James Ujaama's times in London are sketchy. Despite this, Ujaama featured in a collection of videotapes which had been given by Hamza to Glen Jenvey, a "freelance" British counterintelligence specialist. He monitors Islamists' internet transactions, and has amassed videos of Al-Muhajiroun. Jenvey, posing as a jihadist, persuaded Abu Hamza to allow him access to videotapes, which he coppied. These were later passed on to the FBI. Among the collection, Ujaama was shown sitting next to Hamza, and two extracts are found on Jenvey's website. One of these can also be found on YouTube.

I have transcribed both speeches from these extracts, as they give a perspective of how Ujaama spoke when amongst his Islamist companions. They appear to have been made after March 2000, as the longer sample mentions Jamil Al-Amin who was arrested for murdering a police officer at this time.

Extract One
"That's what we said. We help cops. But I'm gonna tell you, we're not going to do that. We are holding this conference for the Muslim brothers and the Muslim sisters, who want to leave and get out of here, yeah? And we should be very careful, that we watch our tongues, and the slander of Muslims. The slander of Muslims. You mention Afghanistan. OK - I was in Afghanistan and I prayed next to a sincere believing Muslim inshallah because he lay down his [prayer] mat and he invited me to Islam, and we didn't even speak the same language. OK - we couldn't even speak the same language. And I hate - I hate it really bad when somebody says that something of a slander against my Muslim brothers, and that should go for even for my own self, I gotta watch out for, what I even say. So inshallah, we safeguard our tongues, from that which we haven't seen and that which we don't know about - that is my advice to you inshallah, all of us, inshallah."

Extract Two
"Because it is not long ago, that the evil Christians launched a Crusade against the Muslims, the Jews, and even other Christians. Today they are back, in Egypt, and Turkey, and Algeria, and Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, and even in the Islamic lands - the holy lands - of Mecca and Medina. Today, the crusade is against Islam. And they are led by the Jews, because they are misguided and they are astray. They have none to guide them, and so they are used in Israel's long awaited campaign against Islam and to dominate the world. And Rasool Allah says that disbelievers will never cease attacking you, until they turn you back from your religion.

Now even Imam Jamil Al-Amin [former Black Panther H Rap Brown], he too has been pushed to the limit, jailed, convicted in the media, and charged with a crime (for) which they are seeking the death penalty. There is a pattern with all the attempts to assassinate, to rid the Islamic Ummah of its leaders. To silence our leaders. As you shall soon find out. Imam Jamil Al-Amin leads the largest Islamic community of Muslims who do not hide their religion in North America. They are encouraged to speak and learn about Jihad. They are encouraged to enjoy the life and forbid the wrong. They are encouraged to stop tyranny and evil. So what was his crime? His crime was that he was increasing the number of Masrians (?) who were giving him their pledge, pledging him as their leader in America. And this was seen as a threat to the Kufaar - his prior achievements, in turning drug dealers and thugs into proper Muslims, ready to die for Islam."

In the concluding part of this article, I will describe Hamza's attempts to set up terror training camps, both at Bly, Oregon, and other locations.

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Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at August 28, 2007 11:01 PM

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