He also said he threw in the trash a fax in which a young man who attended his mosque told him of plans to build a jihad training camp in Oregon in 1999.
He said he didn't know another of the young men at his mosque had left to fight in Afghanistan.
Prosecutor Ian McGinley said last week in his closing statement that the evidence against Abu Hamza was “simply overwhelming.”
Defense lawyer Jeremy Schneider dismissed what he said was the “quantity of irrelevant evidence,” and said Abu Hamza was being tried for “his words in general, not his deeds.”
Abu Hamza, a father of nine and an engineer by training, became the imam at Finsbury Park in 1997, where he preached vitriolic sermons, in particular against the United States.
The mosque closed in 2003.
Abu Hamza was arrested in August 2004 in Britain at Washington's request, and sentenced in a British court to seven years in jail in 2006 for inciting murder and racial hatred. He was extradited to the United States in October 2012.
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