LONDON, Feb 26: A man who described himself as “Osama bin London” was found guilty of organising extremist training camps and soliciting murder by a British court on Tuesday.

Followers of Mohammed Hamid, 50, included four of the men later convicted of being involved in failed bomb attacks on the London public transport system on July 21, 2005.

Hamid, described in court as a “recruiter, groomer and corrupter of young Muslims” worked with Atilla Ahmet, a former spokesman for the radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri who is serving seven-year jail sentence for race hate crimes and for urging his followers to kill non-Muslims.

Hamza is currently awaiting extradition to the United States on suspicion of involvement in setting up a training camp for Islamist extremists in the northwest state of Oregon.

Ahmet admitted three charges of soliciting murder in September last year, a month before Hamid’s trial began at the high security Woolwich Crown Court in southeast London.

The court heard that Hamid wanted to send recruits for training in Afghanistan and east Africa and that he boasted his name was “Osama bin London”a play on the name of the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The head of anti-terrorism operations at Scotland Yard, Peter Clarke, said in a statement that Hamid and Ahmed were “dangerous people, who between them carried out the recruitment, grooming and terrorist training of young men.

“Hamid directed his recruits through military exercises, teaching them how to defend themselves against armed ambush. This was not innocent activity taking place on a camping weekend,” Clarke said.

“Hamid’s links to men convicted of carrying out the 21/7 (July 21, 2005) attempted bombings in London shows the depth of his involvement in terrorism.” The court heard that Hamid was arrested in October 2004 at a stall in London’s Oxford Street shopping district with the ringleader of the failed 2005 suicide bomb attacks, Muktar Said Ibrahim.

Britain’s security services had begun investigating Hamid after the July 7, 2005 attacks, when four Islamist extremist suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 others on London’s public transport system.

Much of the evidence came from an undercover police officer, who infiltrated the group. During that time, he overheard Hamid say that the number of victims of the July 7 attack “was not even breakfast for me”.—AFP