London: A London court has sentenced British-Pakistani preacher Anjem Choudary to life in prison for directing a “terrorist organization,” Al Jazeera reported. The 57-year-old was convicted last week of directing the banned terrorist organization al-Muhajiroun (ALM). Judge Mark Wall at London’s Woolwich Crown Court sentenced Choudary to a minimum term of 28 years before he would be eligible for parole.
Wall told Choudary at London’s Woolwich Crown Court on Tuesday that organisations such as ALM “normalise violence in support of an ideological cause” through online meetings.
“Their existence gives individuals who are members of them the courage to commit acts which otherwise they might not do. They drive wedges between people who otherwise could and would live together in peaceful coexistence,” he said.
According to prosecutor Tom Little, Choudary became “the caretaker emir” of ALM after its leader, Omar Bakri Mohammed, was jailed in Lebanon in 2014.
Choudary’s lawyer, Paul Hynes, argued that the group was “little more than a husk of an organisation” and that almost all attacks linked to it had already occurred.
The police in Britain, the United States and Canada gathered evidence after a joint investigation, that Choudary was running and directing ALM via online lectures with followers based in New York.
Prosecutors said the group has operated under many names, including the New York-based Islamic Thinkers Society, which Choudary has spoken to.
New York Deputy Police Commissioner Rebecca Weiner, termed the case ‘historic’ and said the Islamic Thinkers Society was ALM’s US branch.
Choudary was convicted with one of his followers, Khaled Hussein. According to the prosecutors, he was also a dedicated supporter of the group.
Hussein, hailing from Edmonton in Canada, is a 29-year-old who was convicted of participating in an illegal organisation, resulting in him serving a five-year term in prison. The authorities nabbed him a year back, along with an accomplice, as soon as Hussein set foot in Heathrow Airport. Previously, Choudary, a supporter of ISIL (ISIS), found himself behind bars in 2016, seeing his freedom again in 2018 after fulfilling half of his sentence, which was five-and-a-half years long. The ALM group, which originated back in the late nineties, has been implicated in numerous domestic and international incidents as per Al Jazeera’s reports.
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