British terrorists convicted

A former cricket team captain and a mathematics student at a suburban university were convicted along with three other men Monday and sentenced to life in prison for plotting to stage a wave of attacks against fellow Britons that would “put terror in their hearts.”

In the conclusion of one of the longest and most expensive trials in English history, the five men were found guilty of conspiring to attack targets such as a crowded nightclub, a sprawling shopping mall and the nation’s gas and electrical grids. The plot was never carried out.

At one point, the conspirators even talked of poisoning cans of beer at football games and arming radio-controlled airplanes with explosives and flying them into British cities.

The 13-month trial provided startling evidence not only of the chilling alienation within parts of Britain’s own Muslim community, but of what authorities believe are connections between Al Qaeda and the British would-be bombers, who underwent paramilitary training in Pakistan.

In a revelation that triggered widespread concern across Britain, it was learned that police knew of at least four meetings in 2004 between the plotters and the suicide bombers who carried out the July 2005 bombings in the London transport system, which killed 52 people. While it was initially believed the transport bombers were unknown to authorities, evidence at the trial showed that police tailed one of the bombers, Mohamed Sidique Khan, as part of the current case well before the 2005 explosions.

The news prompted demands for a new inquiry into police handling of the transport bombing investigation. But police officials said they had no way of knowing at the time that Khan was a serious terrorism risk and had neither the resources nor the legal authority to open investigations without clear cause.

Prosecutors said the five defendants purchased 1,320 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which can be used to manufacture explosives, and appeared to be casting about for a place to blow it up in retribution for Britain’s military presence in Afghanistan. Some of the defendants said their trips to training camps in Pakistan were in preparation for supporting Muslim fighters in the embattled Kashmir region on the India-Pakistan border.

Testimony from an American Muslim who was involved with the defendants in Pakistan revealed that two of the men said they were reporting to Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, whom they identified as the No. 3 representative of Al Qaeda. U.S. authorities revealed last week that Hadi had been taken into custody last year and has been providing information about Al Qaeda.

The Pakistani-born American, Mohammed Junaid Babar, testified under a grant of immunity.

“It is not an offense to be young, Muslim and angry at the global injustice against Muslims,” the five defendants said in a joint statement read by a defense lawyer after the verdict. “There was no limit to the money, resources and underhanded strategies that were used to secure convictions in this case. This case was brought in an atmosphere of hostility against Muslims at home and abroad.”

But Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan Police Service’s anti-terrorism unit, insisted that “this was not a group of youthful idealists. They were trained, dedicated, ruthless terrorists who were obviously planning to carry out an attack against the British public.”

The judge, Michael Astill, said the men are “considered cruel, misguided misfits by society” and ordered that they not be eligible for parole until they had served major portions of their life sentences. Some of the defendants would be eligible after at least 17 1/2 years while others would not be eligible until they had served 20 years.

“You have betrayed this country that has given you every opportunity,” the judge said.

The man the authorities identified as the ringleader, 25-year-old Omar Khyam, was the grandson of a British army colonel. Khyam grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Sussex, did well at school and was captain of the school cricket team. But during college he fell under the influence of a now-outlawed Islamist group, Al Muhajiroun, and a radical Islamic cleric.

Khyam traveled to Pakistan at age 17 without his mother’s knowledge and attended a militant training camp.

One of his codefendants, Jawad Akbar, 23, a former mathematics and technology student at Brunel University in the suburbs west of London, worked for a time at Gatwick Airport. He became involved with a militant Islamic group at school, and traveled with Khyam and others to a camp in northwest Pakistan in 2003.

Also convicted were Waheed Mahmood, 34; Salahuddin Amin, 31; and Anthony Garcia, 24.

Two other defendants were acquitted after the jury deliberated for 27 days. They were Nabeel Hussain, 21, and Shujah Mahmood, 20, who is Khyam’s brother.

Much of the evidence was compiled as part of a massive surveillance undertaken when employees at a self-storage company in west London telephoned police about ammonium nitrate that was being stored there. Authorities secretly replaced the fertilizer with a substance like cat litter and set up a hidden camera at the rental unit and wiretaps at the homes of the suspects.

In recorded conversations played in court, Akbar and Khyam talk casually about bombing targets and the need, as Akbar put it one day in February 2004, to “put terror in their hearts.”

“Like this for example, the biggest nightclub in central London where now here, yeah, now no one can even turn around and say, ‘Oh, they were innocent,’ those slags dancing around,” he says, using British slang for contemptible people. “If you went for the social structure where every Tom, Dick and Harry goes on a Saturday night, yeah, that would be crazy, crazy thing, man ... blow the whole thing up.”

Khyam suggests considering “the resources from this country, the electricity, the gas.... Get brothers in each and every field, from the gas to the water to the alarm engineers, everything.”

Later, they talk about hijacking a plane to carry out an attack.

Terrorism analysts said the exhaustive surveillance operation uncovered the extent of organization and international networks involved in mounting terror attacks.

“This idea that the major threat comes from people that just pop up and carry out attacks of their own free will -- these sort of attacks need meticulous planning,” said Sandra Bell, a security expert with the Royal United Services Institute. “They need people that are trained, they need to have resources, and it takes a long time, which means you’re going to have to have a network. And the minute they have a network, that means you’re able to infiltrate it.”

kim.murphy@latimes.com