UK : Islamic extremist guilty of airline bomb plot

[hulaku]

Published Date: 07 September 2009

ISLAMIC extremist Abdulla Ahmed Ali was today found guilty of conspiring to murder thousands in an unprecedented airline bomb plot. The 28-year-old was the leader of an east London al Qaida-inspired terror cell, a Woolwich Crown Court jury found.

He planned to detonate home-made liquid bombs in suicide attacks on transatlantic aircraft bound for major north American cities.

Ali was responsible for the most complex and daring British-based terrorist conspiracy in modern times.

With thousands killed in the air and on the ground, the explosions would have exceeded the carnage of the September 11 attacks.

Counter terrorist police, the security services and prosecutors spent more than £35 million foiling the plot and bringing Ali to justice.

The arrest of the gang in August 2006 sparked tight restrictions on carrying liquids on to aircraft that led to travel chaos.

The guilty verdict will come as an enormous relief for Government ministers who endured heavy criticism for introducing the draconian luggage restrictions.

It will also be seen as a vindication of the decision to retry Ali after he was found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions last September. The previous jury failed to reach verdicts on the airline plot.

British-born Ali, of Walthamstow, was inspired by the July 7 bombers and Osama bin Laden and considered taking his baby son on his suicide mission.

He planned to smuggle home-made bombs disguised as soft drinks on to passenger jets run by United Airlines, American Airlines and Air Canada.

The hydrogen peroxide devices would have been assembled and detonated in mid-air by a team of suicide bombers.

Ali singled out seven flights to San Francisco, Toronto, Montreal, Washington, New York and Chicago that departed within two-and-a-half hours of each other.

Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic would have been left powerless to stop the destruction once the first bomb exploded.

Police said the plot was drawn up in Pakistan with detailed instructions passed to Ali during frequent trips to its lawless border with Afghanistan.

They believe a mystery al Qaida bombmaker was responsible for the ingenious liquid bomb design, concealed within 500ml Oasis or Lucozade bottles.

Surveillance teams watched Ali on his return to Britain as he assembled his terror cell, gathered materials and identified targets.

Undercover officers looked on as the unemployed former shop worker used cash to purchase a £138,000 second-floor flat in Forest Road, Walthamstow.

They planted a secret bug that revealed it was converted into a bomb factory where Ali met others to construct the bombs.

The flat was also used as a location for Ali and others to record suicide videos threatening further attacks against the West.

In his video Ali warned the British public to expect "floods of martyr operations" that would leave body parts scattered in the streets.

Ali was watched as he used public phone boxes, mobile phones and anonymous email accounts to keep in touch with mystery terrorist controllers in Pakistan.

On his arrest, he was found to be carrying an elaborate and damning blueprint for the plot scrawled in a battered pocket diary.

Airport security arrangements and details of flights, including the seven highlighted services, were discovered on a computer memory stick in another pocket.

Along with Ali, Assad Sarwar 29, of Walton Drive, High Wycombe, and Tanvir Hussain, 28, of Nottingham Road, Leyton, were also found guilty of involvement in the airline bomb plot today.

But Ibrahim Savant, 28, of Denver Road, Stoke Newington, Arafat Waheed Khan, 28, of Farnan Avenue, Walthamstow, Waheed Zaman, 25, of Queen's Road, Walthamstow, were found not guilty of the airliner plot.

The jury failed to reach a verdict on Umar Islam, 31, of Bushey Road, Plaistow, of the airliner plot.

But Islam was convicted of conspiracy to murder.

Donald Stewart-Whyte, 23, of Hepplewhite Close, High Wycombe, was found not guilty of both conspiracy to murder on aircraft and conspiracy to murder.

Ali, Sarwar and Hussain were convicted of conspiracy to murder in the first trial but retried, along with the five other men, for the airliner plot after the first jury failed to reach verdicts on those charges.

http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Islamic-extremist-guilty-of-airline.5624412.jp

[3rdMillhouse]

Whatever the brits choose to do with him, just don't send him to a scottish prison.

[Britishhawk]

Theres alot of UK Muslim threads going on at the moment! I hope they recieved long prison times, it cost the taxpayer 35million, well spent though.

[The Dane]

Wow.. insane people..

[2495]

Enemy. Within.

With a flow of events like this, is it any wonder muslims are seen as hate filled terror supporting fanatics? Glad they got nailed, and its a damn pity we cannot just execute them for treason in war time.

[hulaku]

Ali was watched as he used public phone boxes, mobile phones and anonymous email accounts to keep in touch with mystery terrorist controllers in Pakistan.

Brings back memories of the Mumbai attack when the terrorists were in touch with 'mystery terrorist controllers' again in Pakistan.

May these fvckwits and their handlers burn in hell!

[NimDod]

In the future, maybe they could also be exchanged for oil?

[Tucker217]

Enemy. Within.

With a flow of events like this, is it any wonder muslims are seen as hate filled terror supporting fanatics? Glad they got nailed, and its a damn pity we cannot just execute them for treason in war time.

I agree, Some Terrorists should be executed. Bring back the death penalty.

[hulaku]

In the future, maybe they could also be exchanged for oil?

The main guy is a British national of Pakistani origin who made a number of trips to Pakistan from 2003 to 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Abdullah_Ali

Pakistan would not want him and even if it did Pakistan has no oilp-)

[rgjbloke]

Bit close to home for me. I live in West London and only about 20 minutes from High Wycombe. They are going to prison for a very long time, hopefully until they are very old men.

[hulaku]

More on the plotters Al Qaida and Pakistan links.


Airline bomb plotters' links to al-Qaida and other convicted terrorists

Connections established with those behind failed attacks on London, and senior figures in Osama bin Laden's network in Pakistan


Al-Qaida and extremists in Pakistan devised and provided key technical knowledge for the 2006 airline bomb plot, British and US counter-terror officials believe.

Plot leaders Assad Sarwar and Abdulla Ali had made several trips to Pakistan. Sarwar had a telephone with multiple SIM cards and both men used international cards and public telephone boxes to make calls to Pakistan.

They seemed to have knowledge of counterterrorism techniques. "Their operational security was very, very good," a senior police officer said. "A large part of this plan was invented in Pakistan."

Woolwich crown court was told that Ali, 28, and Sarwar, 29, exchanged coded emails with terrorist masterminds in Pakistan after they visited the country in 2006. UK counterterrorism officials believe one of those referred to by the codename "Paps" or "Papa" in the correspondence is Rashid Rauf, suspected of masterminding the plot. The emails also refer to his lieutenant sent to Britain in August 2006 to oversee the final stages of an al-Qaida plot aimed at causing mass murder and stunning the west.

Prosecutor Peter Wright QC told the court: "The tenor of the emails from Ali or Sarwar to Pakistan is of a progress report. The tenor of the emails from Pakistan is of instruction, command, direction to the men on the ground.

"They demonstrate also that Ali and Sarwar had entirely different but equally important roles to perform, and they were entirely under the control and direction of Pakistan."

The two men began to lay the groundwork for the airline plot when they returned to the UK from trips to Pakistan in December 2005.

In June 2006 Sarwar flew again to Pakistan, where he was taught how to refine hydrogen peroxide to the high concentration required to produce a bomb, and how to make the chemical detonator HMTD.

Giving evidence to the jury in his own defence, Sarwar told them of a method he had learned to calculate the strength of hydrogen peroxide. He told jurors that his tutor in Pakistan, a Kashmiri freedom fighter called Jameel Shah, had given him advice on handling HMTD and how to boil down the volatile hydrogen peroxide without injuring himself.

"You tend to place it in a large metal pot over a camping stove, keeping it at a low temperature," he said. "You need to monitor it constantly because if it gets too hot, it could catch fire.

"That's how they do it in Pakistan, in the outdoors."

Both Sarwar and Ali were in Pakistan for what police believe was terrorist training at the same time as members of the cell that attacked London on 7 July 2005. Ali was still Pakistan both on the day of attacks on the capital's transport system that killed 52 innocent people and at the time of the attempted attacks of 21 July.

After the two men were arrested along with six fellow plotters, investigators found links to a past terror plot. Ali had been in regular phone contact with one of the gang who tried to bomb London on 21 July 2005. There were several calls between telephones registered to Ali and to Mukhtar Ibrahim in the months running up to the failed suicide bombings. Ibrahim is serving a life sentence for the attempted attack.

UK counter-terrorism officials believe that a trip by Ibrahim to Pakistan in December 2004 for terrorist training was allegedly organised by a man known only as "Gabs" in the airline plot trial. He knew several of the plotters involved in the conspiracy to use bombs disguised as soft drinks to blow up seven transatlantic aircraft, the jury heard.

A naturalised British citizen born in Syria, "Gabs" lives in east London. He was tried and acquitted of a terrorist offence in 2004 but is accused by US authorities of a string of terrorism-related offences. They say he provided "material and logistical support to al-Qaida and other terrorist organisations" and facilitated "travel for recruits seeking to meet with al-Qaida leaders and take part in terrorist training".

They also accuse him of having been "in regular contact with UK-based Islamist extremists, involved in the radicalising of individuals in the UK through the distribution of extremist media" and of having trained at jihadi camps run by a militant Kashmiri group.

Tracked to his last known address, a woman who answered the door denied all knowledge of the man. The Guardian is not naming him for legal reasons.

A counterterrorism source described "Gabs" as a "shadowy figure" and confirmed that he had been one of the factors that had led investigators to the terrorist cell behind the airline plot.

A senior British police source did not rule out the possibility that other people had been involved, but said they believed they had arrested the main conspirators. "We ripped the heart out of this one," he said.

The links between the airline plotters and previous terrorist conspiracies, plus the sophistication of the devices and plotting, led western counterterrorism officials to believe al-Qaida was involved.

It was the arrest of Rashid Rauf in Pakistan under suspicion of being part of the conspiracy that led UK police to speed up their plans to arrest the other suspects. They feared that if the UK cell learned of Rauf's arrest they would believe their capture was imminent and either lash out or try to go to ground.

Rauf later escaped from Pakistani custody. He is thought to have been killed by a US drone strike in November 2008, but some believe he is still alive.

US intelligence believes the cell was directed by al-Qaida leaders, possiblyAbu Obaidah al-Masri, who died of natural causes this year in Pakistan.

Seven of the accused refused to answer questions from detectives after their arrest. Their first accounts came only at the trial when they gave evidence in their own defence. Ali said he had worked in refugee camps on border between Pakistan and Afghanistan after the US invasion, and he decided that British and American foreign policy were the root causes of the suffering he witnessed both personally and through the media.

He would meet Sarwar, with whom he discussed politics and how to try to change things, and together they came to the idea of setting off explosions in Britain. Ali said he and Sarwar discussed a list of targets including Canary Wharf, Liverpool Street station and the Bank of England, "anywhere that is iconic and sensational". UK officials say the planning for any attack on these targets was less advanced than the airline plot.

Ali said that at one point in 2006 he was struggling to find a suitable device when Sarwar said he knew "someone in Pakistan who might be able to help us". Ali said this man had fought in Kashmir against Indian forces based there.

In his suicide video Ali says that warnings from the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to the west to leave Muslims alone had been ignored. The themes in his rhetoric chimed with those from other al-Qaida videos, notably Bin Laden's "foreign lands" speech, and also the video suicide note left by the 7 July bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan.

The strong connections between the convicted plotters and figures in Pakistan are part of the reason the British government has applied increasing public and private pressure on Pakistan to do more to tackle terrorism. Since the plot was disrupted in summer 2006, western intelligence officials both in the UK and the US have grown more fearful that further attacks on the west will be planned on Pakistani soil and carried out by people of Pakistani heritage. Pakistani officials reject these suggestions and say their country is being used as a scapegoat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/07/airline-bomb-plot-pakistan-links

[CMNot]

Great work, solid conviction.

[Eagle The Lightning]

Here is a video of what the bomb would have done, if they had got it on board a flight as planed.

VIDEO (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7536167.stm)

This video shows the damage caused by a liquid bomb to a commercial airliner.
The BBC used a qualified explosives engineer, Sidney Alford, to construct the devices to demonstrate their likely effect on an aircraft fuselage.

[timetraveller]

Whatever the brits choose to do with him, just don't send him to a scottish prison.


How about you just zip it ...

[timetraveller]

Here is a video of what the bomb would have done, if they had got it on board a flight as planed.

VIDEO (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7536167.stm)


Instead of wasting our taxes on there up keep put em on a very old passenger jet ...

in a secure area so they canne escape fly em towards the atlantic have the pilots bail out with a ship below waiting to pick em up and let the RAF use the plane for target practice ...

..........Why in the fk should we have our taxes spent on them

[Excalibur]

good for BP. every terrorist in jail is valuable asset today. p-)

[G-AWZT]

Send them to a prison cell for life. The cell would have no windows, and there would be no direct contact with anyone. The cell would be lit 24hrs and a small camera would monitor the inmate constantly. The cell would be painted bright white, floors walls and ceiling. There would be no TV, no radio, no reading material. The walls would be noise proof so the inmate could not hear others. Meals would be slipped under the door.
If any maintenance is required, guards would wear hoods so the inmate does not see a human face. He is then hooded and made to wear ear muffs, and taken to another room until the inmate's cell is ready.
The inmate's eventual mental breakdown into madness would be his punishment.

[hulaku]

Send them to a prison cell for life. The cell would have no windows, and there would be no direct contact with anyone. The cell would be lit 24hrs and a small camera would monitor the inmate constantly. The cell would be painted bright white, floors walls and ceiling. There would be no TV, no radio, no reading material. The walls would be noise proof so the inmate could not hear others. Meals would be slipped under the door.
If any maintenance is required, guards would wear hoods so the inmate does not see a human face. He is then hooded and made to wear ear muffs, and taken to another room until the inmate's cell is ready.
The inmate's eventual mental breakdown into madness would be his punishment.

Cool story bro!:)

[Mr Gently Benevolent]

Send them to a prison cell for life. The cell would have no windows, and there would be no direct contact with anyone. The cell would be lit 24hrs and a small camera would monitor the inmate constantly. The cell would be painted bright white, floors walls and ceiling. There would be no TV, no radio, no reading material. The walls would be noise proof so the inmate could not hear others. Meals would be slipped under the door.
If any maintenance is required, guards would wear hoods so the inmate does not see a human face. He is then hooded and made to wear ear muffs, and taken to another room until the inmate's cell is ready.
The inmate's eventual mental breakdown into madness would be his punishment.Which would then further burden the prison system with another gibbering panty pissing loon and there is enough of them in there already.

[G-AWZT]

Which would then further burden the the prison system with another gibbering panty pissing loon and there is enough of them there already.



I know. But hey it would be a fitting punishment.

[crush6655]

Send them to a prison cell for life. The cell would have no windows, and there would be no direct contact with anyone. The cell would be lit 24hrs and a small camera would monitor the inmate constantly. The cell would be painted bright white, floors walls and ceiling. There would be no TV, no radio, no reading material. The walls would be noise proof so the inmate could not hear others. Meals would be slipped under the door.
If any maintenance is required, guards would wear hoods so the inmate does not see a human face. He is then hooded and made to wear ear muffs, and taken to another room until the inmate's cell is ready.
The inmate's eventual mental breakdown into madness would be his punishment.
*The walls and floor should be soft so he couldn't jump on his head trying to suicide....