Residents tell of their shock after a traffic stop leads to the discovery of a terrorist training camp inspired by the cleric.

21:43, UK, Monday 19 May 2014

The hamlet of Bly, Oregon, is remote, arid and sparsely populated.

Only a few hundred people live there, many of whom enjoy the solitude, lack of law enforcement, and permissive gun laws.

On the face of it then, Bly did not seem a bad place to try to set up a terrorist training camp on US soil.

From his base at London's Finsbury Park mosque, Abu Hamza conspired to do just that; inspiring followers to find a location, and dispatching associates to train recruits.

The men intent on preparing for holy war might have gone unnoticed were it not for Sergeant Maurie Smith, at the end of his night shift in nearby Klamath Falls, spotting a white compact car with a lighting violation.


He said: "I noticed that they were wearing army fatigues, long trench coat jackets, they had head gear on, long beards, and (were) of Arabic descent."

The driver was "overly polite" and the three adult male passengers behaved oddly, said Sgt Smith, with one of them clutching a briefcase to his chest, the other trying to shelter a young child with his body.

They said some of them were going to San Francisco to sight-see.

With little back up and restrictive search and seizure laws in the state, the officer issued a citation and let them go, but he ran a check on the driver and entered a full report into the system.

The search alerted the FBI, who arrived in Klamath Falls just three hours later.

Sgt Smith said the FBI agents had lost track of the men until he contacted them and said he felt like he had "cheated death that day".

He said: "I was upset about not searching the vehicle, and they said 'well, they're highly trained individuals, we've been tracking them for a while, they are linked to some terrorist organisations', and that basically if you'd hit the right button at that very moment they would have shot you dead on the spot, without feeling any remorse about it."

But not everyone in Bly believes the camp was a hub for violent extremists intent on taking their new jihad skills to Afghanistan.

Many locals, as well as Abu Hamza's own lawyers, contend that little was achieved there other than some perfectly legal horse riding, fitness drills and target practice.

Tow company owner Dean Lawrence said he knew one of the men.

"He used to come by the store and buy gas, ask me for work a few times, seemed a nice guy," he said.

"I think it's been made out to be worse than what it was."

Former county sheriff Tim Evinger said his community was in shock after the discovery.

He said: "You know the biggest lessons were that this can happen anywhere, it can happen in our back yard here in remote Oregon, it can happen in the cities."

This conviction is the latest in a string of high-profile terror cases being tried in New York.

In March a jury found Osama bin Laden's son-in-law Sulaiman Abu Ghaith guilty of terrorism offences.

Richard Barrett, former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, said: "Abu Hamza was very typical of many people at that time in the late 90s and early 2000s, of skating along that line between being a complete rabble rouser and being a bit of a threat, a real threat.

"He probably wouldn't be able to do anything particularly operationally sophisticated because he's not that sort of guy, but there's no doubt that through his radical preaching and so on, he could persuade others that was the right thing to do."

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