DHAKA: Radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada has been found not guilty of terrorism offences by a court in Jordan.

A panel of civilian judges sitting at Amman’s State Security Court cleared him of being involved in a thwarted plot aimed at the millennium celebrations in 2000.

The ruling comes after he was acquitted in June of conspiring in a 1998 bombing campaign in Jordan.

Abu Qatada was deported from the UK in July 2013.

The verdict follows a long legal battle by ministers in the UK to force the scholar to face trial in his home country.

But though he will soon be free, he will not be returning to London.

The radical cleric, whose real name is Omar Othman, was granted asylum in the UK in 1994 but the security service MI5 increasingly saw him as a national security threat, reports the BBC.

BDST: 1418 HRS, SEP 24, 2014