A US judge has sentenced British hate preacher Abu Hamza to life behind bars for the deadly kidnapping of Western tourists in Yemen and terrorism, calling him "evil" and his crimes "barbaric."
The hook-handed imam, blind in one eye and a double-hand amputee, was a tabloid bogeyman in Britain after the September 11 attacks for preaching vitriolic, anti-American sermons at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London.
The 56-year-old stared impassively at the table and pursed his lips as Judge Katherine Forrest jailed him for life, eight months after he was convicted by a jury following a four-week New York trial.
Saying he will never be released, Forrest told the court the world could not be safe with such a man at liberty exhorting others to acts of violence in the name of religion.
Abu Hamza, whose hands were blown off by an explosives experiment in Pakistan, had alarmed the jury for professing to love Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
Forrest said she had thought long and hard about the severity of the sentence, for a complicated man who was a loved father of nine but who showed no remorse.
"Evil comes in many forms but doesn't always show itself immediately in all its darkness," Forrest said. There is "a side of you that this court views as evil."
She said he played a leadership role in the 1998 kidnapping of 16 Western tourists in Yemen, four of whom were killed, and in trying to set up a terror training
camp in Oregon in 1999.
His crimes were "barbaric" and "unacceptable in a civilised society," she added.
