Lebanon arrests Omar Bakri

Lebanese police on Sunday arrested radical Islamic preacher Omar Bakri, just days after he boasted he would "not spend one day" of a life sentence behind bars.

Reuters/Omar Ibrahim

"He was arrested by a patrol of intelligence agents from the Internal Security Force in his home in [the northern city] Tripoli," a security official told the AFP wire service.

"He is currently being transferred to Beirut."

Police fired in the air to disperse curious onlookers who had gathered around Bakri’s
home.

Bakri, was sentenced to life by a Lebanese military court on Thursday. He was found guilty, along with more than 40 other Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians and Saudis, of "incitement to murder, theft and the possession of arms and explosives."

The day after sentence was passed he insisted he was innocent and declared that he would "not spend one day in prison."

"I will not hand myself in to any court. I do not believe in the law in Britain as in Lebanon," he told AFP at his home.

Bakri is a Syrian-born 50-year-old fundamentalist Sunni-Muslim who lived in Britain for 20 years. He has called the 11 September 2001 hijackers the "magnificent 19".
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He was banned from Britain in 2005 as part of government measures following the London underground and bus bombings that year.

After the bombings he said that he would not hand over to police Muslims planning to launch attacks and called former UK prime minister John Major and Russia's former president Vladimir Putin "legitimate targets."