Daily Mail
January 12, 2015
Abu Hamza was tonight jailed for life by a New York judge who branded him ‘evil’ and said she never wanted him to be released.
The hate cleric nodded his head and pursed his lips as Judge Katherine Forrest told him he was ‘barbaric’ and that he had shown no remorse or sympathy to his victims..
Judge Forrest said that a life sentence was the only option as she could never conceive of a time when he would not be a danger to the public – even 20 years from now.
Judge Forrest said that for Hamza ‘the sheer point of your crimes is the killing of others and the destruction of a way of life, our way of life’.
She said: ‘This is unacceptable in a civilised society. It’s barbaric, it’s misguided, it’s wrong’.
Judge Forrest – who was sitting a few blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks – said that ‘evil comes in many forms’ and that Hamza disguised his true colours behind his religion.
She said: ‘I do believe that there is another side to you – another side that this court views as evil.’
Hamza was jailed at Manhattan’s Federal Court in a hearing that marks the end game for one of Britain’s most reviled public figures.
His awful legacy was made clear this week after it emerged one of the suspects in the Paris massacre was a devotee of a former Hamza disciple at the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, where he was imam.
Another link was that Hamza was found guilty of helping in a hostage taking in Yemen in 1998 that left three Britons and an Australian dead – the same country where the Paris suspects got their training.
Hamza’s other convictions related to facilitating violent jihad in Afghanistan and trying to set up a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon.
Speaking after the sentence Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said: ‘Abu Hamza’s blood-soaked journey from cleric to convict, from Imam to inmate, is now complete.