Britain Arrests Anti-U.S. Firebrand

LONDON —  Police from Scotland Yard seized one of Europe’s most prominent Muslim radicals Thursday, arresting Abu Hamza al Masri on a warrant for extradition to the United States amid allegations that he was involved in an attempt to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon.

Within hours of the arrest in west London, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft went before reporters in New York and unveiled an 11-count indictment against Masri, linking him to a 1998 terrorist hostage-taking in Yemen and an alleged plan in 1999 to set up a training base for Al Qaeda in Bly, Ore.

The Egyptian-born Masri was already defending himself against the British government’s move to strip him of his British citizenship and send him to Yemen, where he also faces charges. Now it appears likely that he will end up in U.S. custody, unless he can convince courts here that he would not receive a fair trial in America.

Britain will not extradite suspects to countries where they would face the death penalty, so the U.S. would have to promise that Masri could not be executed. British Home Secretary David Blunkett said the Bush administration had already made such a commitment.

“We have an agreement with the U.S., which I reaffirmed a year ago, that the death penalty would not be put in place,” he told BBC Radio.

However, a Justice Department spokesman in Washington, Bryan Sierra, said no decision had been made about whether prosecutors would seek the death sentence, and he did not confirm that an assurance had been given to Britain.

“There is a point in the process at which any such assurances, if sought, would be addressed. It has not happened,” he said, declining to comment about whether the U.S. had provided any informal assurance.

Masri, 47, is a onetime mujahedin fighter in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, during which he lost an eye and both hands in an explosion. He gained notoriety after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with fiery sermons at his Finsbury Park mosque in north London that lauded the attacks and accused the U.S. and Britain of waging war against Islam.

Since the 1990s, the mosque has served as a magnet for Islamic radicals in Europe. Among those who went there to pray and study were several people whom authorities later linked to the Al Qaeda network, including convicted “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, accused in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.

Investigators over the years believed that the mosque functioned as a major recruiting center in Europe for Osama bin Laden, but there was disagreement over whether Masri was directly involved in terrorist activities -- something he has denied -- or merely a spokesman spreading anti-Western ideology.

Some British Muslims applauded the detention of a man they said popularized a distorted version of their religion and led young people astray onto radical paths. But many also expressed concern that Masri might not receive a fair hearing before U.S. courts.

Ashcroft had a photograph of the cleric on an easel alongside him as he revealed the indictment, first handed up April 19, at his news conference.

“As today’s arrest makes clear, the Department of Justice is bringing the full weight of the criminal law against those who support the activities of terrorists,” the attorney general said. “The United States will use every diplomatic, legal and administrative tool to pursue and to prosecute those who facilitate terrorist activity.”

Police took Masri from his home on a leafy street in west London at 3 a.m. without apparent incident. At a hearing later in the day at a magistrate’s court in Belmarsh Prison, he was ordered detained pending a full extradition hearing. His lawyer promised a tenacious battle against the extradition and said he considered the arrest politically motivated.

Legal experts say any extradition would take about six months to carry out.

The charges appeared to stem partly from the decision last year by Earnest James Ujaama, a Seattle entrepreneur and civic activist who converted to Islam and later became a follower of Masri, to cooperate with U.S. authorities.

Ujaama had been arrested and accused by U.S. prosecutors of proposing a farm in rural Oregon as a potential training camp for Islamic radicals in the U.S., allegedly winning Masri’s initial cooperation in the scheme. In the fall of 1999, according to federal authorities, Ujaama faxed Masri the proposal for a “jihad training camp.” Around the same time, prosecutors allege, Masri received information that weapons and ammunition were being stockpiled in the United States

Originally charged with 15 counts of supporting terrorism, Ujaama in April 2003 was allowed to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiring to assist the Taliban government in Afghanistan, for which he was sentenced to two years in prison, half of which he had already served.

Asked by The Times two years ago, after Ujaama’s arrest, whether he had ever wanted to set up such a training camp in Oregon, Masri called the allegation preposterous.

“What are you going to train there for ... shooting trees like John Wayne? What can you do in America?” Masri said.

After the 2003 plea bargain, the U.S. attorney in Seattle, John McKay, said Ujaama would “assist this nation and other nations in the fight against terrorism,” and it was widely assumed that Ujaama would be willing to testify against Masri, with whom he had studied and worked in London in the late 1990s.

In addition to the training camp allegation, the charges against Masri unveiled Thursday include providing aid to Al Qaeda and conspiracy to take hostages in a December 1998 attack in Yemen that resulted in the death of three British tourists and a traveler from Australia.

The indictment charges that Masri provided a cellphone to a leader of a faction of the Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan and other co-conspirators in the hostage plot and that he received three calls from the phone to his home on Dec. 27, 1998, the day before terrorists seized 16 tourists, including two Americans, from a caravan of sport utility vehicles.

Court papers allege that the cleric talked with and agreed to act as an intermediary for his co-conspirators after the attack. On Dec. 29, he allegedly bought extra airtime for the phone being used by the terrorists.

The indictment alleges that Masri supported and facilitated jihad training in Afghanistan and that one of his co-conspirators traveled from London to New York in 2001 to raise money for a fund at his mosque used to send recruits to the camps.

Prosecutors charged in the 18-page indictment that Masri asked an unnamed U.S. citizen to escort a co-conspirator from London to a camp operated by a “front-line commander” in Afghanistan and that he introduced the American to another person for the purpose of arranging safe houses in Pakistan for the trip.

Under U.S. law, the maximum sentence in connection with the hostage-taking is life imprisonment or death. Masri faces a maximum of up to 100 years on the other charges.

Masri, born Mustafa Kemal Mustafa, first came to Britain as a student and for a time worked as a doorman and bouncer at nightclubs in the Soho district. He obtained British citizenship by marrying a Briton in 1981 and retained that status after divorcing in 1985.

During the latter part of the 1980s, he went to Afghanistan, joining thousands of Arab volunteers from around the world in the U.S.-funded resistance to the Soviet occupiers of the country.

After the Soviet Red Army retreated from Afghanistan, Masri returned to Britain and established a reputation as a firebrand.

With one good eye and a steel hook for a hand, a black-and-gray beard and a radical temperament, he became a target of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, which demanded that he be arrested or thrown out of the country for his anti-British, anti-American tirades.

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Daniszewski reported from London and Goldman from New York. Staff writers Richard B. Schmitt in Washington and Janet Stobart of The Times’ London Bureau contributed to this report.