British Al Qaeda aide sentenced

A British man being treated for schizophrenia was sentenced to 20 years in prison on U.S. charges that he helped in a failed attempt to set up an Al Qaeda training camp in a remote part of Oregon two years before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Haroon Aswat, 41, had admitted in a guilty plea in March that he traveled to Bly, Ore., in 1999 at the direction of Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, a radical cleric based in London and more widely known as Abu Hamza Masri.

Aswat, born in Sheffield, England, also admitted that his job was to help train recruits who wanted to fight jihad.

But his lawyers argued in federal court in New York that he deserved a lesser term because he was a minor player in the plot who became a personal assistant to Mustafa but never adopted his views.