British radical Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary has been sentenced to life imprisonment for directing a terrorist organization and encouraging support for it.
Anjem Choudary, a prominent British radical Islamist preacher, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Tuesday for his role in directing the terrorist organization al-Muhajiroun and encouraging support for the banned group. The 57-year-old was convicted last week and will serve a minimum term of 28 years before being eligible for parole.
“Organisations such as yours normalise violence in support of an ideological cause,” Judge Mark Wall stated during the sentencing at London’s Woolwich Crown Court. “Their existence gives individuals who are members of them the courage to commit acts which otherwise they might not do. They drive wedges between people who otherwise could and would live together in peaceful coexistence.”
Choudary, once Britain’s most high-profile Islamist preacher, gained notoriety for his inflammatory statements, including praising the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and expressing a desire to convert Buckingham Palace into a mosque. He was previously imprisoned in 2016 for encouraging support for the Islamic State but was released in 2018 after serving half of his five-and-a-half-year sentence.
Prosecutor Tom Little described Choudary as “the caretaker emir” of al-Muhajiroun, stepping into a leadership role after fellow Islamist preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed was jailed in Lebanon in 2014. Despite defense arguments that the organization was “little more than a husk” and that most terrorist acts linked to it had already occurred, Judge Wall emphasized that al-Muhajiroun remained “a radical organisation intent on spreading sharia law to as much of the world as possible, using violent means where necessary.”
Choudary’s trial also involved Canadian citizen Khaled Hussein, 29, who was arrested on the same day as Choudary in 2023 upon arriving at Heathrow Airport. Hussein was found guilty of membership in a proscribed organization and was sentenced to five years in prison.
This life sentence underscores the UK’s firm stance against terrorism and the efforts to dismantle networks that incite violence and extremism.
