Britain's High Court on Wednesday issued an interim injunction blocking the extradition of two terror suspects to the United States to face terror charges, following a a last-ditch appeal lodged by the duo after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) backed their extradition earlier this week.
A spokeswoman for the the Judiciary Office in a statement Wednesday said a High Court judge has taken the appeals filed by Abu Hamza al-Masri and Khaled Al-Fawwaz for consideration and adjourned the cases to a hearing in open court.
"The judge has issued interim injunctions preventing their removal prior to those hearings. The judge has directed the hearings be fixed urgently," she added.
It is understood that the judge has set hearings for next Tuesday and Wednesday. To avoid extradition, the duo will have to prove to the court that there is "some new and compelling factor" that was not considered by previous courts.
The development comes two days after Strasbourg-based ECHR rejected a final request made by Masri, Fawwaz and three other terror suspects to halt their extradition from Britain to the United States to face terrorism charges.
A panel of five ECHR judges on Monday rejected the application filed by the five to refer their case to the Strasbourg court's upper Grand Chamber on grounds that their extradition to US would breach their human rights.
The judges refused to reopen the cases, rejecting claims of possible rights violations in the United States. The five defendants were attempting to appeal against an earlier ECHR ruling that approved their extradition to the United States.
Earlier, the five suspects had argued in an appeal heard by a seven-member ECHR judges panel in July that the prospects of their solitary imprisonment in a US maximum security prison with the possibility of a life imprisonment would be in direct violation of their human rights.
Nevertheless, the ECHR judges panel unanimously rejected their appeal, and ruled their extradition to the United States permissible under EU laws as US prison conditions would not violate their human rights. They said assurances provided by the US Justice Department as well as conditions at ADX Florence, a Federal supermax jail in Colorado, guaranteed that the rights of the suspects will not be violated while in the US.
The British Home Office had welcomed Monday's ECHR decision not to refer the cases of Abu Hamza and four others to the Grand Chamber, saying: "We will work to ensure that the individuals are handed over to the US authorities as quickly as possible."
Masri, a radical Islamic cleric, is currently serving a seven-year sentence in UK for spreading racial hatred and urging his followers to murder non-Muslims. He has been fighting extradition to the US since the request was first filed in May 2004. He is blind in one eye and wears a hook in place of a hand he claims to have lost while fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He first came to Britain on a student visa and later acquired a British passport through marriage.
Egyptian-born Masri is wanted in the US for various terrorism charges, including funding terrorism, organizing a terrorist training camp in Oregon between 1998 and 2000 and helping in the kidnapping of 12 Westerners in Yemen in 1998. Khaled al-Fawwaz and another defendant, namely Adel Abdul Bary, are accused of involvement in organizing the 1998 US Embassy bombings in East Africa.
Of the remaining three, Haroon Aswat is accused in the Oregon training camp, while Babar Ahmad and Seyla Talha Ahsan, are accused of supporting terrorism using a website operated in London.
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