Abu Hamza al-Masri (born 15 April 1958), born Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, was an Egyptian-British imam from the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, England. In 2015 he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole by the United States for inciting violence and racial hatred.
Biography[]
Mustafa Kamel Mustafa was born on 15 April 1958 in Alexandria, Egypt to a middle-class Egyptian Army officer. In 1979 he entered the United Kingdom on a student visa, and claimed that the UK was a paradise where you could do anything you wanted. He studied civil engineering at Brighton Polytechnic College, but in the early 1990s he lived in Bosnia under another name and fought alongside Bosniaks against the Yugoslav People's Army and the Croatian Army during the Yugoslav Wars. He became a jihadist and lost an eye and both of his hands while working with explosives with the Pakistani Army in Lahore, and in 1999 "Abu Hamza al-Masri"'s son Kamel Mustafa was arrested with Hamza's stepson Mohsin Ghalain for planning a terrorist bombing. While leading the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, England, he supported the creation of an Islamic caliphate and supported the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) until they started killing civilians. In 2004 he was arrested in the UK for terrorism and he was later extradited to the United States. In January 2015 he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for terrorism.