Abu Hamza’s five-bedroom family home set for taxpayer-funded makeover in west London
The wife of the radical Muslim cleric, Najat Chaffe, is the only person registered at the five-bedroom Edwardian property in Shepherd’s Bush, west London.
Funded by the public purse, it is set for a pricey facelift that will see new windows, doors and solar panels installed by specialist tradesmen, as well as loft insulation.
Hamza, who is serving a life sentence in the US, has eight children who grew up in the home.
A "tenancy for life" arrangement means Hammersmith and Fulham Council are unable to remove his wife, and are legally required to keep the home in good condition.
Jose Afonso, Conservative opposition leader on the council, has hit out at the renovations as "a disgusting waste of public money".
"Residents will be appalled to know that not only are we housing the families of terrorists, we are doing so in five-bedroom houses and paying for extensive upgrades," he said.Chaffe moved into the property with her eight children back in 1995 after claiming to have separated from Hamza.
The council said it was legally bound by law to upgrade around 1,000 properties in the borough. Planning permission has been submitted pending approval, with works set to finish before the end of the decade.
While Hamza was never registered at the property, he was spotted there multiple times before he was initially arrested in 2004.
The former preacher is known for openly celebrating 9/11 when he was a cleric at Finsbury Park mosque.A British court convicted him in 2006 of inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder.
In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison by a court in New York for supporting terrorism after being extradited from the UK.Three of his sons who lived in Shepherd’s Bush property have served jail terms for offences related to drugs, money laundering and fraud in the years since.
One of them, Sufean Kamal, 31, was stripped of his citizenship in 2016, three years after he travelled to the Middle East to join the civil war against the Assad regime.
He is appealing against the decision, which he says has left him stateless.
The Home Office, which is opposing the appeal, says the original decision came after MI5 informed the Government that Mr Kamal had gone to Syria to join an Islamist extremist group and that removing his citizenship was “conducive to the public good”.
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