LONDON, April 17 (Reuters) - Six British Muslim men were found guilty on Thursday of collecting money for the purposes of terrorism or inciting people to fight British and U.S. forces in Iraq. Among the six was Omar Brooks, also known as Abu Izzadeen, a man who leaped to public attention in 2006 when he publicly heckled then Home Secretary John Reid in front of television cameras. The men will be sentenced on Friday. The guilty verdicts follow a three month trial at Kingston Crown Court, 10 miles (16 km) west of London. One of the six jumped bail while the jury was considering its verdict and is being hunted by police. "These are extremely serious offences. The overwhelming majority of people totally reject the deeply offensive views peddled by these defendants," said John McDowall, head of the Metropolitan Police Service's Counter Terrorism Command. "They deliberately set out to incite people to carry out terrorist acts." The charges arise from speeches and preaching the men were involved in at London's Regents Park Mosque on November 9, 2004. The court was told that the men had gone to the mosque to observe Ramadan. During the late afternoon and evening their speeches became progressively more inflammatory, prosecutors said. The men called on people to fight British and American forces in Iraq and to donate money to fund attacks. Police were called to the mosque in the evening by security staff who were concerned about the activities of the men and the content of their speeches. During searches of a property following arrests made following the Danish cartoon protests in central London in February 2006, police discovered video tapes of some of the speeches made by the men in the November 2004 incident. (Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Peter Griffiths and Sami Aboudi)
A general view shows a Palestinian refugee camp near the Iraqi-Syrian borders in Iraq, about 650 km (404 miles) west of Baghdad, April 14, 2008. The camp includes 1,930 Palestinian refugees, ...
