UK radical cleric found guilty of encouraging ISIL support
Anjem Choudary, a former leader of the banned extremist group al-Muhajiroun (ALM), was convicted of encouraging support for the Islamic State terrorist group, authorities in England said Tuesday.
Choudary, 49, and Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, 33, were found guilty in a trial July 28, Metropolitan Police in London said in a statement.
Though the convictions came nearly three weeks ago, reporting restrictions on the trial were lifted Tuesday, authorities said.
In the statement, police said Choudary and Rahman were found guilty of inviting support for the Islamic State between June 29, 2014, and March 6, 2015.
In a series of talks posted on YouTube, Choudary encouraged support for the terror group, the BBC reported, noting that counter-terrorism chiefs have spent almost 20 years trying to bring him to trial. Choudary is a former spokesman for ALM, which has been linked to dozens of terror suspects.
Evidence showed that since 2014, the Islamic State had invited supporters to deliver speeches and pledge allegiance to the group. In July 2014, Choudary and Rahman contacted Mohammed Fachry, an Islamic State sympathizer in Indonesia, via Skype, text and phone, and pledged their allegiance to the group and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Fachry later published the oath, signed by Choudary, on an Indonesian website, police said.
Authorities said Choudary and Rahman were “recruiters and radicalizers” for decades. ALM is believed to be the driving force behind several terror attacks, including the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London. In those attacks, terrorists detonated three bombs in subway cars and a fourth on a double-decker bus, killing 52 people.
Police also said ALM was the inspiration behind the fatal 2013 stabbing of British Army soldier Lee Rigby, who was killed by a pair of attackers near the Royal Artillery Barracks in southeast London.
BBC reported that ALM’s leader, Omar Bakri Muhammad, fled the United Kingdom after the 2005 bombings. Since then, it said, Choudary “has become one of the most influential radical Islamists in Europe and a string of his followers have either left the U.K. to fight in Syria or tried to do so.”
In one speech, delivered in March 2013, Choudary said he wanted the Muslim faith to "dominate the whole world,” BBC reported. “Next time when your child is at school and the teacher says, 'What do you want when you grow up? What is your ambition?' they should say 'To dominate the whole world by Islam, including Britain — that is my ambition,'" he said.
Commander Dean Haydon of the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism unit said Choudary and Rahman, who were arrested nearly two years ago in September 2014, had “stayed just within the law for many years." But he said no one in the counter-terrorism world "has any doubts of the influence that they have had, the hate they have spread and the people that they have encouraged to join terrorist organizations.”
Haydon added, "Over and over again we have seen people on trial for the most serious offences who have attended lectures or speeches given by these men.”
The pair will be sentenced Sept. 6.
Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo