Portrait of the Week – 11 February 2006

Mustafa Kemal Mustafa, known as Abu Hamza, the hook-handed Muslim cleric, aged 47, was sentenced to seven years in jail on six charges of soliciting to murder, two charges of ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred’, a charge of possessing video and audio recordings intended for distribution to stir up racial hatred, and a charge under the Terrorism Act 2000 of possessing a document, the Encyclopaedia of the Afghani Jihad, containing information ‘of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. He was acquitted on three other charges of soliciting to murder and one of stirring up racial hatred. The judge said, ‘I do not make the mistake that you represent Islamic thinking generally.’ Four days earlier, police had refrained from arresting anyone during a demonstration in London against a Danish cartoon depicting Mohammed, even though some protesters’ placards called for killing and massacre. At another demonstration at the Danish embassy in London, police did not arrest a young man dressed up like a suicide-bomber. He turned out to be one Omar Khayam from Bedford, who apologised on television shortly before it was discovered that he had been released on licence from a six-year sentence for possession of cocaine with intent to supply; he was sent back to prison. The government changed the provisions of the Education Bill to be debated next month, so that schools would in future be prohibited by law to interview candidates for admission; the changes were intended to mollify Labour MPs. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, pressed ahead with plans to merge police forces in four regions of England, against the wishes of constabularies such as Cleveland. Harry Williams, the former Dean of Chapel at Trinity College, Cambridge, who in 1969 became a monk at Mirfield, died, aged 86.