MAIL ONLINE: The Queen contacted the Home Secretary and asked why the cleric was still a free man / She believed he must have broken the law and was 'upset' he had not been arrested / Hamza's appeal against extradition has failed - ending an eight-year legal saga costing UK taxpayers £1m / Judges in Strasbourg threw out his bid to reopen the case yesterday
The Queen directly intervened in the case of radical cleric Abu Hamza and asked the Home Secretary why he had not been arrested for his campaign of hate and violence in Britain.
She was so 'upset' by the content of his hate sermons, she contacted the Home Secretary to ask 'why is he he still at large?'
The Monarch's intervention was revealed today as the hook-handed criminal lost his final appeal against extradition to the United States.
According to the BBC's veteran security correspondent Frank Gardiner, the Queen 'was upset that her country and its subjects were being denigrated by this man who was using this country as a platform for his very violent, hateful views’.
When asked how he knew, he said: 'She told me.'
The security services, including MI5, had first wrongly dismissed the hate preacher as a 'noisy troublemaker' rather than a man bent on inciting violence.
'The Queen was pretty upset that there was no way to arrest him,' Mr Gardiner said.
'She couldn’t understand - there was surely some law he had broken. Well in the end, sure enough, she was right. He was eventually convicted and jailed for seven years for soliciting murder and racial hatred.
‘She spoke to the Home Secretary at the time and said my goodness, why is he still at large?
'He was conducting these radical activities and he called Britain a toilet, he was incredibly anti-British and yet he was sucking up money from this country for a long time and was a huge embarrassment to Muslims - who condemned him.'
The Home Secretary spoken to by the Queen was probably David Blunkett, who held the post from 2001 until 2004, the year Hamza was finally arrested.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the claims made on the BBC's Today programme on Radio 4. » | Martin Robinson | Tuesday, September 25, 2012
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: BBC apologises for revealing Queen's Hamza concerns: The BBC has apologised for revealing that the Queen had privately expressed concern over why Abu Hamza had not been arrested. » | Tom Whitehead and Sam Marsden | Tuesday, September 25, 2012
