Britain moved today to deport Abu Hamza al-Masri, the country's most outspoken radical cleric, who until recently was the imam of a mosque in North London widely depicted as a recruiting ground for fundamentalist Islam and Al Qaeda.
David Blunkett, the home secretary, said today that he had sent Mr. Masri a letter withdrawing his citizenship and that Mr. Masri had 10 days to appeal or be deported.
Mr. Masri, 44, is an Egyptian-born former nightclub bouncer who has one eye and wears a hook where a hand was blown off by a land mine in Afghanistan 20 years ago. Newspapers and members of Parliament have increasingly called for his expulsion since evidence emerged that he persuaded young British Muslims to wage holy war against the West.
Mr. Blunkett's move to expel Mr. Masri was the first taken under new laws that came into effect Tuesday empowering the government to strip immigrants with dual nationalities of their British citizenship and deport them if their activities threatened the national interest.
Mr. Blunkett said the action against Mr. Masri was based on the cleric's having encouraged people "to take part in the jihad and fight us overseas."
"If you encourage, support, advise, help people to take up training, if you facilitate them, then, of course, that takes you right over the boundary," he asserted.
Mr. Masri supports Osama bin Laden, praises as martyrs those who carried out the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and has called Prime Minister Tony Blair a "legitimate target" for Muslim warriors.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, "Many people will be happy, jumping up and down at this moment." His Finsbury Park mosque held a service last Sept. 11 commemorating what it called a "towering day in history."
Among people who worshiped at his mosque were Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who was arrested in Minneapolis and faces conspiracy charges in Alexandria, Va., in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, the Briton who pleaded guilty in Boston to having tried to blow up a Miami-bound jetliner en route from Paris in December 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes.
Many British Muslims have deplored Mr. Masri and his use of the Finsbury Park mosque to promote violence and hatred. But Britain has been fertile ground for Islamic militants because of its diverse population and relatively tolerant admissions policy, as well as London's place as a transportation hub and Europe's biggest financial center.
British Muslims have been discovered fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and some have reportedly been imprisoned by United States forces at Guantánamo Bay. French investigators have coined the term "Londonistan" to depict Britain as a haven for Islamic terrorists.
Antiterror police officers stormed the Finsbury Park mosque in January and arrested seven people on charges related to the discovery earlier that month of the deadly toxin ricin in a London house. They found no chemicals in the mosque. Mr. Masri was removed from his post as imam of the mosque a month later, after he declared that the crew of the Columbia space shuttle five Americans, an Indian-born Hindu and an Israeli represented a "trinity of evil" punished with death by God.
Mr. Masri came to Britain in 1979 and became a citizen after marrying a British woman..
Mr. Blunkett denied to the BBC today that he planned to use his new powers to round up other radical clerics and said that the action against Mr. Masri involved what he did to attack British interests rather than what he said about them.
"We are not talking about a big-mouth shouting off," he said. "Irritating though that is, they have the right to do so."