Also found guilty of the same offense was 33-year-old co-defendant Mohammed Mizanur Rahman of north London.
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The verdict was only made public Tuesday after reporting restrictions around the trial were lifted.
Hate preacher Anjem Choudary, who helped radicalise a string of terrorists including soldier Lee Rigby’s killers, is facing years in jail for drumming up support for Islamic State.
Both men went on to publish a series of videos on Youtube attempting to legitimise the Caliphate and inviting support for it. Evidence showed that Choudary had been encouraged to get this message out to his followers by, amongst others, Siddhartha Dhar, who later left the United Kingdom to fight with Daesh.
The infamous leader figure in the banned extremist group al-Muhajiroun (ALM) now faces a maximum possible sentence of 10 years in prison.
Despite protesting his innocence, he continued to express extreme views during his Old Bailey trial, refusing to denounce the execution of journalist James Foley by so-called Jihadi John, aka Mohammed Emwazi, in Syria in 2014. For me, it is a matter of worship. Over the years since, Choudary has become one of the most influential radical Islamists in Europe and a string of his followers have either left the United Kingdom to fight in Syria or tried to do so.
“I was asked about it and said no, we live with people, our neighbors, so we differ with the people in IS”, he said.
“If you can not say when you believe in something and you can not share that view, then you don’t really have freedom to express yourself in this country”, said the cleric. He had been arrested past year and been in and out of prison after breaching his bail conditions.
Commander Dean Haydon, head of the Metropolitan Police counterterrorism command, said Choudary and Rahman “stayed just within the law for many years, but there is no one within the counterterrorism world that has any doubts of the influence that they have had, the hate they have spread and the people that they have encouraged to join terrorist organizations”. But an ideologue, a thinker, who encouraged others not to stop and think for themselves before they turned to violence to implement their shared worldview. “That was the key piece of evidence that tipped him over the line for a terrorist offence”.
One of the Bangladeshi attackers, who killed 22 people during an assualt on a Dhaka cafe on July 1, was also a follower of Choudary on social media.
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Among Choudary’s many United Kingdom followers is Indian-origin ISIS fighter Siddhartha Dhar dubbed as “Jihadi Sid” by the United Kingdom media and now believed to be among the senior ISIS commanders.
