Abu Hamza in fresh bid to get let out of maximum security US jail as he moans of 'draconian conditions'
11 September 2023, 05:59
Abu Hamza is attempting to be moved out of a supermax US prison, claiming he is enduring "hell".
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The jailed hate preacher was extradited to the US and given a life sentence at ADX Florence in Colorado in 2015.
Hamza, formerly of Finsbury Park Mosque, praised the 9/11 attackers and was jailed after facing 11 terror charges, including the kidnapping of tourists in Yemen in 1998 and assisting terrorists.
He spends almost every minute of the day in a windowless and soundproof cell the size of a shed in the jail that also contains El Chapo and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.
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His lawyer is complaining he suffers in "draconian conditions" and he has contracted Covid multiple times.
"We anticipate raising, among other things, the draconian conditions of confinement that he has been subjected to at ADX Florence," Michael Bachrach said.
He plans to ask for compassionate release next month.
The appeal could see him get moved out of solitary confinement and into a lower security jail.
Bachrach argued the prison's conditions "have led to multiple bouts of Covid-19, substantially failing health, and 24/7 solitary confinement for the past eight years", claiming they were "in contravention of the representations made by the United States to obtain his extradition from the United Kingdom".
When he was sentenced in 2015, the judge in New York, Katherine Forrest, said Hamza showed no remorse for his actions and "any time he is released, the world will not be safe".
She said what he did was "barbaric, misguided and wrong", and noted he expressed no sympathy for the victims of the Yemen kidnappings.
Hamza became notorious in the UK during the 2000s, with his public image perpetuated by his hooked hands. He lost his hands in a chemical accident in Pakistan in 1993.
