Abu Qatada al-Filistini

Omar Mahmoud Othman (عمر بن محمود بن عثمان; born 30 December 1960), better known as Abu Qatada al-Filistini (أبو قتادة الفلسطيني), is a Salafi cleric and Jordanian national.

Abu Qatada was accused of having links to terrorist organisations and frequently imprisoned in the United Kingdom without formal charges or prosecution before being deported to Jordan, where he was acquitted of multiple terrorism charges.

Abu Qatada, who was born Omar Mahmoud Othman, has Jordanian nationality because he was born in Bethlehem in the West Bank in 1960, which at that time was ruled by Jordan.

He obtained his Bachelor's in Islamic jurisprudence in 1984 while in Jordan and his Master's in the same subject from the Peshawar University, where he became a lecturer through the influence of another Jordanian-Palestinian influential jihadi cleric, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi.

Abu Qatada said that while in Pakistan he had no relationship to Al-Qaeda, which was just beginning to form in Afghanistan at that time.

In 1989, he went to Peshawar in Pakistan where he served as a professor of sharia sciences.

In 1991, after the Gulf War, Abu Qatada was expelled from Kuwait, along with many other Palestinians.

Abu Qatada claimed asylum in the United Kingdom in 1993 on a forged passport.

He returned to Jordan, but in September 1993, he fled with his wife and five children to the UK, using a forged UAE passport.

Citing religious persecution and stating he had been tortured in Jordan, Abu Qatada requested asylum, which was granted in June 1994.

Around 1994, Abu Qatada started up and was editor-in-Chief of a weekly magazine, Usrat al-Ansar, a Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) propaganda outlet.

Abu Qatada provided the intellectual and ideological support for the journal, which became "a trusted source of news and information about the GIA for Islamists around the world."

In 1995, Abu Qatada reportedly issued a fatwa stating that it is justified to both kill Muslims who renounce their faith and kill their families.

In 1997, Abu Qatada called on Muslims to kill the wives and children of Egyptian police and army officers.

Abu Qatada was granted leave to remain to 30 June 1998.

On 8 May 1998, he applied for indefinite leave to remain.

In 1999, he was convicted in absentia in Jordan of planning thwarted terror plots during Jordan's millennium eve and was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment with hard labour.

He was found not guilty by a Jordanian court of terrorism charges relating to one alleged 1999 plot.

In October 1999, he gave a speech at London's Four Feathers mosque in which he "effectively issued a fatwa authorising the killing of Jews, including Jewish children", according to the British case against him.

On that date British authorities detained him under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001.

Abu Qatada was repeatedly imprisoned and released in the United Kingdom after he was first detained under anti-terrorism laws in 2002 but was not prosecuted for any crime.

The Algerian government described Abu Qatada as being involved with Islamists in London and possibly elsewhere.

This application had not been determined before Abu Qatada's arrest on 23 October 2002.

After initially barring the United Kingdom from deporting Abu Qatada to Jordan, in May 2012 the European Court of Human Rights denied him leave to appeal against deportation.

On 12 November 2012, the UK Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) upheld Abu Qatada's appeal against deportation and released him on restrictive bail conditions.

The Home Secretary Theresa May said the government would appeal against the decision.

According to Conservative politician Boris Johnson, Abu Qatada's residence in Britain is estimated to have cost the British taxpayer at least £500,000 in benefit payments to his family and other expenses by early 2012.

The Daily Telegraph claimed the cost to be as high as £3 million by May 2012, a figure that was not confirmed by the British Home Office.

Abu Qatada belonged to the Salafi sect, though he strongly criticised the followers of fellow Salafi Rabee al-Madkhali for being too closely aligned to the Saudi government.

At the same time Abu Qatada praised fellow Salafi writer Nasiruddin Albani and considered him a great scholar.

He was deported to Jordan on 7 July 2013, after the UK and Jordanian governments agreed and ratified a treaty satisfying the need for clarification that evidence potentially gained through torture would not be used against him in his forthcoming trial.

Abu Qatada resided in the United Kingdom until 7 July 2013, when he was deported back to Jordan to face retrials for alleged involvement in varied Jordanian mayhem.

He was freed after both Jordanian retrials, in which by formal agreement with the UK government evidence obtained by torture was discarded.

On 26 June 2014, Abu Qatada was retried as is required by the Jordanian legal system if the defendant is returned to the country.

He remained in prison pending a verdict that was due September 2014 on a second alleged plot.

On 24 September 2014, a panel of civilian judges sitting at Amman's State Security Court cleared him of being involved in a thwarted plot aimed at Western and Israeli targets in Jordan during the millennium celebrations in 2000 due to "insufficient evidence".

Evidence used to convict him in the previous trial were overturned, per the treaty signed between the United Kingdom and Jordan, as they may have been potentially acquired through torture.

Despite his history with militancy, scholar of Islam Daniel Lav argues that it should not hide his scholarly credentials in traditional Islamic studies, as "he certainly has connections to al-Qaʻida, but he is also the author of a polemic against the theological views of a nineteenth-century rector of al-Azhar, coauthor of a reference work on the eleventh-century scholar Ibn Hazm's evaluations of transmitters of hadith, and editor of an influential twentieth-century Wahhabi work of theology."

In the same tone, Victoria Brittain, a former associate foreign editor of The Guardian, and who knows him personally, also says that "the man behind the myth is a scholar with wide intellectual and cultural interests. He wrote books while he was in prison. His home is filled with books."

His imprisonment ended in September 2014.