Terrorist Abu Hamza launches new bid to be released from ‘hell’ US jail
CAGED terrorist Abu Hamza has launched a new bid to be released from the US jail dubbed “a clean version of hell”.
The hook-handed hate preacher was given a whole life sentence in the supermax jail in 2015 after being extradited to the US and convicted of terrorism and kidnapping.
But he is now claiming Covid has left him too ill to live in solitary confinement at Colorado’s ADX Florence prison.
The 65-year-old former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque in North London spends 23 hours a day alone in a stark windowless, soundproof cell.
Court papers say Hamza — who heaped praise on the 9/11 hijackers — will ask for “compassionate release”.
The Islamist firebrand’s lawyer argued “draconian conditions” had led him to suffer “multiple bouts of Covid-19 and substantially failing health”.
He said: “We anticipate raising, among other things, the draconian conditions of confinement that he has been subjected to at ADX Florence,”.
He argued the conditions “have led to multiple bouts of Covid-19, substantially failing health, and 24/7 solitary confinement for the past eight years”.
Hamza was locked up after facing 11 terrorism charges, including the kidnapping of 16 tourists in Yemen in 1998, assisting terrorists, and planning a terrorist training camp in Oregon.
An appeal over his extradition failed when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that “conditions at ADX would not amount to ill-treatment”.
At his sentencing in New York, judge Katherine Forrest said that Hamza had expressed no remorse for his actions and that “any time he is released, the world will not be safe”.
She added: “You have not expressed sympathy for the victims of the Yemeni kidnappings.”