Mosque’s dark past had links to terror

THE Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, not far from the Arsenal Football Club, was for years a breeding ground for radical Islam and terrorism, generating foreign fighters who waged war against Western allies in Afghanistan and plotted terror in the West.

Hate preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri, who had lost an eye and his hands and who wore a hook as an artificial hand, was the imam there from 1997 until he was sacked in 2002, preaching fundamentalism and antiWest rhetoric and supporting terrorism.

Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, a British man and al-Qaeda supporter who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight in 2001 using a bomb contained in a shoe, attended the mosque.

Another worshipper radicalised there is Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who became the “20th hijacker’’ involved in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

Both men are serving life jail terms without parole.

Hamza, from Egypt, was convicted of terrorism offences in the UK and is now serving life in jail after being extradited to the United States after an eight-year legal battle and being convicted of a string of terrorism offences there.

But in 2005, the community, backed by the Muslim Association of Britain, reclaimed the mosque and worked to make it over as a mainstream mosque and community hub.

So determined was the new board of trustees to distance themselves from the previous regime, they changed the name of the mosque to the North London Central Mosque, although it never caught on.

The mosque has been the target of hate crimes before, when a molotov cocktail was thrown at it after the Paris terror attacks in November 2015.

The chairman of the Finsbury Park Mosque and vicepresident of the Muslim Association of Britain, Mohamed Kozbar, has aggressively campaigned to change the mosque’s image and remake it as a progressive place of worship.

Earlier this year, after winning a defamation case against a ratings agency that had listed the Finsbury Park mosque on a terrorist database, resulting in its bank account being closed, Mr Kozbar said the mosque had a “zero tolerance’’ approach to terrorism and radicalism.