Court hears Hamza speak of 'legitimate targets'

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza urged his followers to "bleed the enemies of Allah" and accused Britain and the US of killing…

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza urged his followers to "bleed the enemies of Allah" and accused Britain and the US of killing Muslim children, the Old Bailey heard today.

In a two-hour lecture, a tape of which was played to the jury, the preacher told his congregation to use a "kitchen knife" or "mice poison" to help re-establish the authority of Allah, as they did not have chemical or nuclear weapons.

Hearing his voice for the first time, the jury listened as Hamza listed banks, courts, brothels and video shops as legitimate targets and talked of fighting until a Muslim leader was ruling from the White House.

He also suggested that living among non-Muslims was like living in a toilet and said they were under the heavy boots of non-believers, the court heard.

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In another speech played to the jury today, he attacked Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the former US President, accusing the West of killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through sanctions.

The handless cleric also described churches in the West as places of "dancing, iniquity, business and black magic".

"Many, many people - George Bush, Bill Clinton - they stand up and they say `we love Islam, we like Islam, it's a great religion'," Hamza told his audience during the lecture, recorded in 1999.

"Tony Blair comes, says Eid Mubarrak (an Islamic greeting), but he makes sure when he says Eid Mubarrak that his aeroplane making our Eid (a Muslim festival) is impossible, untolerable, dark and he kills many of our children.

"So he's belying about the religion. What he says practically, like somebody says `we love you very much, we respect you' and he stabs you in the back.

"We are not against the Iraqi people, but yet they kill them - if they don't kill them by aeroplanes they kill them by what? Sanctions. Hundreds of thousands of children are getting killed. Muslim children are getting killed."

Hamza (47) from west London, faces nine charges under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 alleging he solicited others at public meetings to murder Jews and other non-Muslims.

He also faces four charges under the Public Order Act 1986 of "using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred".

A further charge alleges Hamza was in possession of video and audio recordings, which he intended to distribute to stir up racial hatred.

The final charge under section 58 of the Terrorism Act accuses him of possession of a document, the Encyclopaedia of the Afghani Jihad, which contained information "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".

The cleric denies all the charges.

In the first of the tapes played to the court today, Hamza talked of how to re-establish Khilafa - "the authority of Allah on earth" - and said it was a "long, bloody way".

The video, of a two-hour talk given by him in 1997/98 to a private meeting in Whitechapel, east London, showed Hamza standing on a platform with other Muslims dressed in sandy-coloured headwear and a grey robe.

On the front of the platform was a banner with the words Al Jihad written prominently in red.

The cleric told his audience that the first phase of fighting was called "the needle of bleeding the enemy".

"We ask Muslims to do that, to be capable to do that, to be capable to bleed the enemies of Allah anywhere, by any means," he said.

"You can't do it by nuclear weapon, you do it by the kitchen knife, no other solution. You cannot do it by chemical weapons, you have to do it by mice poison."

Hamza then talked of protecting the Khilafa, saying this continued "so on and so forth, until you see the Khilafa sitting in the White House ruling from there".

Democracy was "crumbling" and was in "freefall", he claimed.

In a question and answer session, Hamza was asked by a member of the audience how to go about Jihad.

Hamza told him: "Monitor the targets which are the enemies of Islam in person and the enemies of Islam as an establishment.

"Every court is a target and every brothel is a target and everybody who's endorsing that is a target and anybody who goes into these places to protect them, to invite people for them, is a target."

Once they had bled the enemy, they would be on the run, he said, adding: "A person who comes to the toilet... he should be very keen to get out of it quickly because it smells and changes the human's nature and you can't really worship very good in a toilet, as you all know."

Hamza stated that the backbone and the main source of income in this country was based on usury, prostitution, alcohol, taxation and plotting against Third World countries.

People came to the country for knowledge and business, and wanted to work hard, but very few came for religious reasons.

"If somebody is being given the choice between his religion and his neck, he should choose his religion and give his neck up," the cleric said.

The trial was adjourned until tomorrow.