NEW YORK: Britain’s Islamist leader Abu Hamza told his US terror trial on Thursday that his hands were blown off during an explosives experiment in Lahore in 1993.
The device was prepared by an Arab with the same name as an expert alleged to have taught Al Qaeda recruits in Afghanistan in 2000-01.
Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, 56, better known in Britain as Abu Hamza al Masri, has pleaded not guilty in New York to 11 kidnapping and terror counts that pre-date 9/11.
He is charged over the 1998 kidnapping in Yemen of 16 Westerners, conspiracy to set up a jihad training camp in Oregon in 1999, of providing material support to Al Qaeda, of assisting the Taliban and of sending recruits for terror training in Afghanistan.
Taking the stand in his defence for a second day, he told the court he moved with his family to Pakistan in 1992 to do reconstruction work in Afghanistan.
After Saudi funders pulled the plug on multi-million-dollar projects, he said he helped Arab veterans of the 1980s Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union find jobs with the Pakistan Army.
Those with army tactics and explosives experience were needed “to help with the army in other areas of conflict”, Abu Hamza testified.
In 1993, he said, he was designing a steel plate with a Pakistani engineer as part of a wider, unidentified project for which “others were designing explosives”.
He said he introduced the army to “some Arabs”, including an Egyptian married to a Pakistani woman.
This Arab had the same name, Abu Khabab, as the man whom British Al Qaeda recruit Saajid Badat said taught explosives at a jihad training camp in Afghanistan in 1999-2001.
The work took place in army accommodations in Lahore, he added.
“I was very surprised,” Abu Hamza said, describing how explosives were tested on empty land between two villas outside on the street.
“I was surprised why the neighbours were not complaining or calling the police. They were all army families,” he said.
The Arab man was lax with “health and safety”, he said, and prepared a small container of explosives which “Commander Ilyas” put in a detonator before leaving.