Cleric preached a message of death and hate, jury told

A Muslim cleric motivated by "hatred and intolerance" toured Britain for four years exhorting followers to murder Jews, Hindus and Westerners using bombs, chemicals and nuclear weapons, the Old Bailey was told yesterday.

Abdullah el-Faisal, 39, used meetings advertised as Islamic study circles in towns and cities from Bournemouth to Manchester to deliver speeches in which he called on all Muslims from the age of 15 to wage jihad or an armed struggle against "unbelievers" and follow the example of Osama bin Laden.

The Jamaican-born preacher, who converted to Islam at 16 after being raised as a member of the Salvation Army, is said to have made video and voice recordings of his 90-minute talks which were put on sale in specialist Islamic bookshops.

The court was told Mr el-Faisal, who was sent to Britain as an imam from Saudi Arabia, would repeatedly tell audiences that America and Britain, in league with the Jewish and Hindu faiths, were engaged in a conspiracy against Islam and all Muslims should adopt "the bullet not the ballot".

Using the tapes to call on British Muslims to travel to Israel to kill Jews and claiming it was right to kill a Hindu in the street, the cleric was, in effect, "preaching murder" to thousands of followers of Islam, the jury was told. In one tape, entitled Jihad and showing a tank straddled by a soldier holding a gun on the cover, Mr el-Faisal is heard to call America "the Great Satan" and say Allah had ordered the murder of all kuffars, or non-believers.

The cleric tells his audience: "This is how wonderful it is kill a kuffar: You crawl on his back and while you are pushing him down into the hell fire, you are going into paradise."

Justifying use of a nuclear bomb on India, the cleric is said to have told one audience: "Use the bodies of unbelievers to run power stations by incinerating them."

David Perry, for the prosecution, said: "The plain ordinary and simple meaning of the words used by the defendant was to exhort his audience to kill and terrorise the unbeliever. What is noticeably absent from these talks are expressions of love, hope, charity, compassion or pity. We say he was preaching hatred and intolerance."

The cleric, arrested last February, denies five charges of soliciting murder and two counts of inciting racial hatred. He came to Britain in the early Nineties after leaving Jamaica to study Islam in Riyadh. Mr el-Faisal was born William Forest and raised as a Christian.

Mr el-Faisal spent much of the hearing making notes in the dock. He also denies two further charges of possessing and distributing the tapes.