Portrait of the Week – 11 February 2006

Mustafa Kemal Mustafa, known as Abu Hamza, the hook-handed Muslim cleric, aged 47, was sentenced to seven years in jail on six charges of soliciting to murder, two charges of ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred’, a charge of possessing video and audio recordings intended for distribution to stir up racial hatred, and a charge under the Terrorism Act 2000 of possessing a document, the Encyclopaedia of the Afghani Jihad, containing information ‘of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. He was acquitted on three other charges of soliciting to murder and one of stirring up racial hatred. The judge said, ‘I do not make the mistake that you represent Islamic thinking generally.’ Four days earlier, police had refrained from arresting anyone during a demonstration in London against a Danish cartoon depicting Mohammed, even though some protesters’ placards called for killing and massacre.