To some observers, it always seemed rather odd that Abu Hamza al-Masri spent eight years and more than £150,000 of British taxpayers’ money fighting extradition to America. After all, the militant Islamist preacher had been in a British prison — principally at Belmarsh in South London and, later, Long Lartin in Worcestershire — since May 2004. Did it really make that much difference, swapping a jail cell in one hated infidel country for a jail cell in another? But the former Soho nightclub bouncer — convicted in Britain of ‘soliciting to murder’ and inciting racial hatred — has always feared the Americans getting their hands on him.
@highlight
Spent eight years & £150,000 of British taxpayers' money fighting extradition
@highlight
Now housed in Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Manhattan, New York
@highlight
Alleged terrorist can stare at his 7½ft x 8ft cell's stained breeze-block walls
Lawyers warn that Hamza’s family — his wife is still living in a £1 million council house in @placeholder — may not be allowed into the U.S. to see him.
Chiding Britain for not trying @placeholder itself on some of the charges he faces in the U.S., he has trotted out the standard line of lawyers defending notorious clients that ‘a test of a civilised society is how it treats people it despises’.