By IRNA,
London : A Scottish computer expert faces trail in the US hacking into computers at the Pentagon after losing an appeal Wednesday against his extradition in his final appeal to the House of Lords, Britain’s highest judicial authority.
Law lords ruled that 42-year old Gary McKinnon should be extradited, but his legal team said they would be taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights.
“Gary McKinnon is neither a terrorist nor a terrorist sympathizer,” his lawyers said in a statement after the ruling based on Britain’s controversial extradition agreement with the US.
“His case could have been properly dealt with by our own prosecuting authorities. Instead, we believe that the British government declined to prosecute him to enable the US government to make an example of him,” the statement said.
“American officials involved in this case have stated that they want to see him ‘fry’. The consequences he faces if extradited are both disproportionate and intolerable and we will be making an immediate application to the European Court,” it said.
McKinnon, an unemployed computer systems administrator from north London, has admitted invading computer systems belonging to the US military in 2001, shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
He insists that he was merely searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life, but American officials labelled him the world’s most dangerous hacker and accused him of deleting important files and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage.
According to prosecutors, McKinnon scanned more than 73,000 US government computers and hacked into 97 machines belonging to the US army, navy, air force and Nasa.
His lawyers have said that he could face up to 60 years in prison as a result of his actions, and could even be classed as an “enemy combatant” and interned at Guantanamo Bay.
Instead they argued that he should face prosecution under Britain’s more lenient computer crime laws because he carried out the hacking from his bedroom in London.