Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 28 years for directing a terrorist organisation.
Choudary, 57, from Ilford in east London, was found guilty last week of directing al-Muhajiroun (ALM) and encouraging support for it through online meetings.
He helped found ALM in 1996 and spent nearly 30 years running its operations under dozens of different names.
It can be disclosed that members have been linked to at least 21 different terrorist plots and senior members travelled to Syria, where Siddhartha Dhar and Reza Haque joined an ISIS execution squad.
Choudary himself was an associate of Woolwich killer Michael Adebolajo, London Bridge terrorist Khuram Butt, and Fishmongers’ Hall attacker Usman Khan.
He celebrated the 9/11 attacks as a “towering day in history” and Omar Bakri Muhammad, the group’s leader, labelled the 7/7 attackers the “fantastic four” before he fled the UK in August 2005, claiming he had shut down the organisation nine months earlier.
When Bakri was jailed in Lebanon in May 2014, Choudary took over as leader but was arrested and jailed himself four months later, for encouraging support for ISIS.
His licence conditions expired in July 2021 and he began trying to rebuild the organisation, delivering over 40 lectures in one year to audiences of up to 150 across the world and communicating directly with recruits as young as 14 on WhatsApp and Telegram.
Police in different countries ran different investigations
Police in Britain, the US and Canada had been running separate investigations as they became concerned that Choudary was seeking to recruit a new generation of younger followers.
Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Weiner from the New York Police Department (NYPD) described how they sent their “crown jewel” undercover officers to London to testify against Choudary, a “shamelessly prolific radicaliser”.
NYPD had placed two undercover officers, referred to as OP488 and OP377, in the group’s branch in New York, called the Islamic Thinkers Society.
In his first speech, recorded by NYPD undercover officers on 12 June 2022, Choudary boasted that “so many people became shaheed alhamdulillah” [martyrs, praise god].
He said he had been labelled “the number one radicaliser in Britain”, adding: “That is a badge of honour for me. It’s a medallion on my chest. What do you want to call me? An extremist? Fanatic? All of these.”
In another recording on 26 June, Choudary told them: “You know we always manage to escape prosecution. You know no one has ever been prosecuted in this country for being a member of al-Muhajiroun.”
In a discussion with members of the Islamic Thinkers Society on 26 March last year, he advised them to set up a series of different “platforms”, adding: “We ended up having loads of them – if you look in the Terrorist Act they listed about 15 of them – there’s another 45 we used to use, so this is just a style and means, brother.”
‘Jihad is obliged upon us’
He also encouraged followers to “fight the crusaders” and told them, on 19 February last year: “There’s no doubt, jihad is obliged upon us.”
A week later, on 26 February, Choudary told his audience: “Is terrorism part of the deen [faith]? Yes, even more – horrifying is part of the deen, even to horrify the people.”
MI5 had bugged Choudary’s home and in a conversation with his wife, Rubina Akhtar, on 22 March last year, he told her: “That impact is there – al-Muhajiroun has gone down in history and that’s why they say 40% of all things associated with us. The impact was phenomenal, global.”
