Cleric accused of trying to help al Qaeda

Dean Lawrence used to think it was a joke when he heard all the talk about terrorists thinking about training on a sheep ranch outside his tiny hometown of Bly, Ore.

He was rethinking things Thursday after the arrest of a Muslim cleric in London on charges of trying to establish a terrorist training camp near Bly, a logging and ranching town in the sagebrush-dotted high desert of southern Oregon.

“A small town like this – I read in the paper one time there was 15 people came down to look” at the ranch, Lawrence said Thursday in a telephone interview from the gas station he owns in Bly.

The cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri, was arrested on a U.S. indictment alleging he tried to start the training camp and provided aid to al Qaeda. His now-shuttered Finsbury Park Mosque attracted Sept. 11 suspect Zacarias Moussaoui and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid.

The United States will almost certainly have to rule out the death penalty to get England to hand al-Masri, 47, over for trial.

A volatile preacher with one eye and hooks for hands – lost, he says, fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s – al-Masri has long been the focus of terrorism suspicions there.

Al-Masri has sparked outrage with sermons calling the invasion of Iraq a “war against Islam,” claiming the Sept. 11 attacks were a Jewish plot and calling the Columbia space shuttle disaster a “punishment from Allah” because Christian, Jewish and Hindu astronauts were aboard.

Two people connected to a mosque in Seattle, Semi Osman and James Ujaama, were charged in 2002 with trying to start a training camp for al-Masri, but the charges were dropped in exchange for guilty pleas on lesser charges.

Authorities have said Ujaama sent al-Masri a fax proposing a camp outside Bly, and al-Masri sent two representatives to evaluate the site some 50 miles east of Klamath Falls. The two were reportedly disappointed that the property had no barracks for trainees, and the camp was never developed.

The Klamath County Sheriff’s Department got a tip from Interpol about the ranch in 1999 and sent some deputies to keep an eye on it, but they did not notice much beyond a dozen people taking target practice, said Sheriff Tim Evinger.

The shooting was not enough to catch the notice of neighbor Don Wessel, a retired logger who himself is used to taking shots at gophers on his ranch. He saw the news about al-Masri’s arrest on television.

“There was some people out there that wore long clothes, but the only time we ever saw them was at the post office,” said Wessel.

A grand jury in New York brought an 11-count indictment against al-Masri on April 19, and the charges were announced Thursday.

Prosecutors said al-Masri sought to incite a holy war around the world, and played a major role in a 1998 hostage situation in Yemen that left three British tourists and an Australian visitor dead.

The indictment charged him with hostage-taking and conspiracy in connection with the incident, and also alleges he provided material support to al Qaeda and the Taliban to foment a holy war in Afghanistan.

British Home Secretary David Blunkett said Thursday that an agreement with American officials last year made clear that in al-Masri’s case, “they will not carry out an execution.”