“The militants took the tourists hostage because they sought to negotiate the release of their brethren who had been arrested in Yemen, where Abu Hamza’s son and stepson were making trouble around the same time.” Abu Hamza told them that the practice was justified in Islamic law. And indeed, kidnapping infidels and either killing them, enslaving them, ransoming them or exchanging them for Muslim prisoners, or releasing them outright is fully sanctioned in Islamic law: “As for the captives, the amir [ruler] has the choice of taking the most beneficial action of four possibilities: the first to put them to death by cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of slavery regarding their sale and manumission; the third, to ransom them in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them and pardon them. Allah, may he be exalted, says, ‘When you encounter those [infidels] who deny [the Truth=Islam] then strike [their] necks’ (Qur’an sura 47, verse 4)” — Abu’l-Hasan al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah (The Laws of Islamic Governance), trans. by Dr. Asadullah Yate, (London), Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., 1996, p. 192.
We are always told that Abu Hamza and Muslim clerics like them are hijackers of the true, peaceful Islam. It would be refreshing if a moderate Muslim spokesman explained how he was getting Islam wrong in this case. But they won’t.
“Witness in hook-handed accused terrorist’s trial tells of harrowing escape from militants,” by Daniel Beekman, New York Daily News, May 7, 2014:
This lady is a terrorist’s worst nightmare.
Mary Quin, the daughter of a cop, stomped on the head of a wounded hostage taker to wrest an AK-47 from his hands during a deadly kidnapping by Islamic militants in Yemen in 1998, she said Wednesday in Manhattan Federal Court.
Then Quin sprinted through a hail of gunfire to safety, she said.
The New Zealand-born scientist, who became an American citizen in 1993, was testifying against hook-handed hate preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri, a London-based cleric charged with supporting the kidnapping and with other crimes.
“I reached down and grabbed the barrel of his AK-47,” Quin said, recalling her escape from a raging desert battle between the militants and Yemeni soldiers.
“He grabbed the stock. We were in this huge war of screaming over an AK-47. I was screaming at him and he was screaming at me. I put my foot down on his head and that gave me the leverage to get the gun out of his hands.”
Her quick thinking saved her from the skirmish, in which the hostages were used as human shields with bullets whizzing past their ears.
Three years later, while doing research for a book about the kidnapping, Quin traveled to London and confronted Abu-Hamza with a tape recorder at his mosque.
He admitted talking to the militants by satellite phone during the abduction, which left four tourists dead.
The militants took the tourists hostage because they sought to negotiate the release of their brethren who had been arrested in Yemen, where Abu Hamza’s son and stepson were making trouble around the same time.
“Islamically, it is a good thing to do,” Abu Hamza said in a clip from Quin’s tape that prosecutors played in court.
“It is legitimate,” he added, making jokes about the plot and expressing no remorse over the deaths….