Fertiliser bombers jailed for at least 95 years
By Duncan Gardham and Bonnie Malkin
30/04/2007
The Telegraph
The leader of a British al Qa'eda cell has been jailed for at least 20 years for plotting a bombing campaign to rival the September 11 terror attacks.
(L to R) Jawad Akbar, Omar Khyam, Salahuddin Amin, Anthony Garcia, and Waheed Mahmood
His sentencing was welcomed by Home Secretary John Reid, who has ruled out a public inquiry into the July 7 attacks in London in the wake of new disclosures about the bombers' links to other terrorist plotters.
Mr Reid told the Commons that an inquiry would divert the police and security services away from the fight against terrorism. But he said the Prime Minister had agreed that the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee - which has already investigated the 7/7 attacks - should look again at the evidence.
Omar Khyam was an associate of July 7 plot ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan and boasted of taking orders from al Qa'eda chief Abdul Hadi, number three in the terror organisation.
Khyam, 25, and four others were found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions today following a record-breaking year-long trial at the Old Bailey.
His four co-accused were also given life sentences for their part in the terror plot and warned that they may spend the rest of their lives in jail.
Waheed Mahmood, 34, of Crawley, and Anthony Garcia, 24, of Barkingside, east London, were sentenced to a minimum of 20 years. Jawad Akbar, 23, of Crawley and Salahuddin Amin, 31, from Luton, Bedfordshire were sentenced to a minimum of 17 and a half years.
The judge also imposed concurrent eight-year sentences on those convicted of possessing the ammonium nitrate and aluminium powder.
Sentencing them, Judge Sir Michael Astill told the terror plotters: "You have betrayed this country that has given you every opportunity." The judge added: "All of you may never be released. It is not a foregone conclusion."
Only Akbar returned to court for the sentencing. The others, their lawyers told the judge, all refused to go back into the dock.
The judge said he would address them as if they were all there. He told them: "You have betrayed the country that has given you every advantage in life."
The "spiral of contamination" began with the "preachers of hate who contaminate impressionable young minds", he said.
The judge told Khayam: "You are ruthless, devious, artful and dangerous." He told Garcia: "You turned your murderous ambition on the UK."
Following their convictions at the Old Bailey today a court order banning the media reporting a link with the July 7 suicide bombers was lifted.
The security service has always maintained that the London suicide bombers were merely on the “periphery” of another operation.
But it can now be revealed that Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 gang, was in mobile phone contact with a man called “Q” who was supplying money and equipment from Luton to al-Qa'eda in Afghanistan and was under observation by MI5 in 2003.
Q arranged for Sidique Khan to visit Pakistan where he attended a training camp on the Afghan border organized by the group from Crawley, Sussex in 2003.
The Crawley gang was put under surveillance, after their return to Britain, when an email was intercepted by MI5 from Omar Khyam in Britain to Salahuddin Amin in Pakistan asking for details on bomb-making.
Agents went on to observe Khyam meeting Sidique Khan and another of the July 7 bombers, Shezhad Tanweer, on five separate occasions.
Both of the July 7 leaders also attended a meeting when the fertiliser gang is thought to have finalised their plans and were heard discussing plans to return to Pakistan with the gang - which they did, although the Crawley gang had by then been arrested.
But MI5 decided the two were only “on the periphery” of the main plot, and although they checked Sidique Khan's number plate they chose not to put him under surveillance and did not prioritise following him up.
Today, as July 7 victims called for a public inquiry, the fertiliser gang was found guilty of plotting mass murder on a scale at least as big as their Yorkshire comrades following one of the longest trials in criminal history.
Alongside Khyam, Akbar, Amin, and Garcia were found guilty of conspiring to cause explosions likely to endanger life between 1 January 2003 and 31 March 2004.
Two other men, Nabeel Hussain and Shujah Mahmood, were found not guilty.
The fertiliser they had bought was only 80lb short of the 1,400lbs used in the Oklahoma bomb attack by Timothy McVey which killed 168 people.
During 3,500 hours of conversations recorded by MI5, the gang of middle-class young men was heard discussing attacking targets including the Ministry of Sound Nightclub and Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.
"The biggest nightclub in central London where no one can even turn around and say 'oh they were innocent' those slags dancing around and other things,” said Jawad Akbar, referring to the Ministry of Sound.
"We could do it tomorrow if you like,” Waheed Mahmood said a week later, referring to the shopping centre.
Salahuddin Amin confessed to police he had been asked by an al-Qa'eda operative to try and obtain a radioactive isotope bomb from the Russian mafia which would be “bigger than 9/11”.
The gang even talked about poisoning beer at football games and joked about attacking Prime Minister's question time, according to an informant, while Khyam was heard on surveillance tapes talking about hijacking a British Airways plane and crashing it.
The operation was said to be directed by al-Qa'eda and Khyam, the British-born leader of the gang, accepted that he had supplied equipment to Abdul Hadi, said to be number three in the terror organisation. Informant Mohammed Babar said Khyam told him Britain “needed to be hit”.
"He said 9/11 happened in America and nothing had happened in the UK,” Babar added. “He said we need to hit certain spots like pubs, nightclubs and trains.”
Although the Crawley gang was under surveillance, police only became aware that they had stored 600kg of fertiliser when Emma Wallis, a worker at Access Self-Storage in Hanwell, North West London was chatting to her boyfriend at a pub in Ealing, West London.
The couple were talking about unusual items stored in the lock-up and he told her that fertiliser could be used for explosives, persuading her to contact the police.
The fertiliser had been bought from an agricultural merchants called Bodle Brothers in Burgess Hill, Sussex by Anthony Garcia, in November 2003. Calling himself Tony, he said he wanted the chemical for his allotment, although it would have had to be the size of four or five football pitches and it was the wrong time of year for planting.
"I hope you're not going round bombing anything,” the manager told him.
On March 15, Khyam, who had paid for that month's storage in cash, visited Access to get his change. After telling staff it would be the last month they needed to use the storage facility, cameras installed by Scotland Yard's Anti-terrorism Command caught him checking the fertiliser, which by then had been substituted for an inert substance.
The bomb would have needed an accelerant and at Khyam's family home in Crawley, behind the garden shed, was found a Sainsbury's Danish butter cookies tin, containing several plastic bags of aluminium powder, which had been smuggled in from Pakistan.
Although there was not enough to make all the fertiliser explode, petrol could have been used as an alternative. It had been planned that Babar would bring detonators from Pakistan to Britain overland through Iran, Turkey and Eastern Europe.
The gang had experimented with a Panasonic tape player as well as shampoo bottles and shaving cream canisters for hiding the devices, Babar said, but the plan was dropped when they suspected that Pakistani security services were following Q.
Instead Canadian Momin Khawaja allegedly worked on remote controlled detonation for a December attack but it was claimed he took until January to get the device working.
He visited London on February 20 to explain it to the gang and when Canadian police raided his home in Ontario, they allegedly found a matching pair of home-made transmitter and receiver circuit boards among the computer equipment in a second floor room.
Khawaja was said to have written an email to the others on January 25 2004 saying: “Praise the most high. We got the devices working.”
In a statement issued after the verdict was announced, the Director General of the Security Service, Jonathan Evans, said: "I welcome this outcome. It is recognition of the hard work put in by my staff, the police and other agencies, and represents another plot prevented - one of a growing number of potentially devastating attacks that the Service has stopped."
Downing Street said today that the foiling of the fertiliser bomb plot represented "a success" which had saved "many lives".
Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman also urged against jumping to the conclusion that the 7/7 attacks could have been prevented in the light of new evidence released after today's convictions.
"We should recognise this for what it is," he said.
"It is a success. It is the prevention of a very serious set of attacks. As a result many lives have been saved."
Amid calls for an independent inquiry, the spokesman added: "We shouldn't jump from the fact that new evidence has now been made public to the assumption that in some way 7/7 could have been prevented."
He added that there had already been an independent inquiry by the Intelligence and Security Committee, which had been kept abreast of new information throughout the trial.
Mr Blair today asked the committee, chaired by Paul Murphy, to check again that there was no information which had been overlooked, the spokesman said. "Just to make absolutely sure, the Prime Minister has asked them to do the task one more time."
telegraph.co.uk
By Duncan Gardham and Bonnie Malkin
30/04/2007
The Telegraph
The leader of a British al Qa'eda cell has been jailed for at least 20 years for plotting a bombing campaign to rival the September 11 terror attacks.
(L to R) Jawad Akbar, Omar Khyam, Salahuddin Amin, Anthony Garcia, and Waheed Mahmood
His sentencing was welcomed by Home Secretary John Reid, who has ruled out a public inquiry into the July 7 attacks in London in the wake of new disclosures about the bombers' links to other terrorist plotters.
Mr Reid told the Commons that an inquiry would divert the police and security services away from the fight against terrorism. But he said the Prime Minister had agreed that the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee - which has already investigated the 7/7 attacks - should look again at the evidence.
Omar Khyam was an associate of July 7 plot ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan and boasted of taking orders from al Qa'eda chief Abdul Hadi, number three in the terror organisation.
Khyam, 25, and four others were found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions today following a record-breaking year-long trial at the Old Bailey.
His four co-accused were also given life sentences for their part in the terror plot and warned that they may spend the rest of their lives in jail.
Waheed Mahmood, 34, of Crawley, and Anthony Garcia, 24, of Barkingside, east London, were sentenced to a minimum of 20 years. Jawad Akbar, 23, of Crawley and Salahuddin Amin, 31, from Luton, Bedfordshire were sentenced to a minimum of 17 and a half years.
The judge also imposed concurrent eight-year sentences on those convicted of possessing the ammonium nitrate and aluminium powder.
Sentencing them, Judge Sir Michael Astill told the terror plotters: "You have betrayed this country that has given you every opportunity." The judge added: "All of you may never be released. It is not a foregone conclusion."
Only Akbar returned to court for the sentencing. The others, their lawyers told the judge, all refused to go back into the dock.
The judge said he would address them as if they were all there. He told them: "You have betrayed the country that has given you every advantage in life."
The "spiral of contamination" began with the "preachers of hate who contaminate impressionable young minds", he said.
The judge told Khayam: "You are ruthless, devious, artful and dangerous." He told Garcia: "You turned your murderous ambition on the UK."
Following their convictions at the Old Bailey today a court order banning the media reporting a link with the July 7 suicide bombers was lifted.
The security service has always maintained that the London suicide bombers were merely on the “periphery” of another operation.
But it can now be revealed that Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 gang, was in mobile phone contact with a man called “Q” who was supplying money and equipment from Luton to al-Qa'eda in Afghanistan and was under observation by MI5 in 2003.
Q arranged for Sidique Khan to visit Pakistan where he attended a training camp on the Afghan border organized by the group from Crawley, Sussex in 2003.
The Crawley gang was put under surveillance, after their return to Britain, when an email was intercepted by MI5 from Omar Khyam in Britain to Salahuddin Amin in Pakistan asking for details on bomb-making.
Agents went on to observe Khyam meeting Sidique Khan and another of the July 7 bombers, Shezhad Tanweer, on five separate occasions.
Both of the July 7 leaders also attended a meeting when the fertiliser gang is thought to have finalised their plans and were heard discussing plans to return to Pakistan with the gang - which they did, although the Crawley gang had by then been arrested.
But MI5 decided the two were only “on the periphery” of the main plot, and although they checked Sidique Khan's number plate they chose not to put him under surveillance and did not prioritise following him up.
Today, as July 7 victims called for a public inquiry, the fertiliser gang was found guilty of plotting mass murder on a scale at least as big as their Yorkshire comrades following one of the longest trials in criminal history.
Alongside Khyam, Akbar, Amin, and Garcia were found guilty of conspiring to cause explosions likely to endanger life between 1 January 2003 and 31 March 2004.
Two other men, Nabeel Hussain and Shujah Mahmood, were found not guilty.
The fertiliser they had bought was only 80lb short of the 1,400lbs used in the Oklahoma bomb attack by Timothy McVey which killed 168 people.
During 3,500 hours of conversations recorded by MI5, the gang of middle-class young men was heard discussing attacking targets including the Ministry of Sound Nightclub and Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.
"The biggest nightclub in central London where no one can even turn around and say 'oh they were innocent' those slags dancing around and other things,” said Jawad Akbar, referring to the Ministry of Sound.
"We could do it tomorrow if you like,” Waheed Mahmood said a week later, referring to the shopping centre.
Salahuddin Amin confessed to police he had been asked by an al-Qa'eda operative to try and obtain a radioactive isotope bomb from the Russian mafia which would be “bigger than 9/11”.
The gang even talked about poisoning beer at football games and joked about attacking Prime Minister's question time, according to an informant, while Khyam was heard on surveillance tapes talking about hijacking a British Airways plane and crashing it.
The operation was said to be directed by al-Qa'eda and Khyam, the British-born leader of the gang, accepted that he had supplied equipment to Abdul Hadi, said to be number three in the terror organisation. Informant Mohammed Babar said Khyam told him Britain “needed to be hit”.
"He said 9/11 happened in America and nothing had happened in the UK,” Babar added. “He said we need to hit certain spots like pubs, nightclubs and trains.”
Although the Crawley gang was under surveillance, police only became aware that they had stored 600kg of fertiliser when Emma Wallis, a worker at Access Self-Storage in Hanwell, North West London was chatting to her boyfriend at a pub in Ealing, West London.
The couple were talking about unusual items stored in the lock-up and he told her that fertiliser could be used for explosives, persuading her to contact the police.
The fertiliser had been bought from an agricultural merchants called Bodle Brothers in Burgess Hill, Sussex by Anthony Garcia, in November 2003. Calling himself Tony, he said he wanted the chemical for his allotment, although it would have had to be the size of four or five football pitches and it was the wrong time of year for planting.
"I hope you're not going round bombing anything,” the manager told him.
On March 15, Khyam, who had paid for that month's storage in cash, visited Access to get his change. After telling staff it would be the last month they needed to use the storage facility, cameras installed by Scotland Yard's Anti-terrorism Command caught him checking the fertiliser, which by then had been substituted for an inert substance.
The bomb would have needed an accelerant and at Khyam's family home in Crawley, behind the garden shed, was found a Sainsbury's Danish butter cookies tin, containing several plastic bags of aluminium powder, which had been smuggled in from Pakistan.
Although there was not enough to make all the fertiliser explode, petrol could have been used as an alternative. It had been planned that Babar would bring detonators from Pakistan to Britain overland through Iran, Turkey and Eastern Europe.
The gang had experimented with a Panasonic tape player as well as shampoo bottles and shaving cream canisters for hiding the devices, Babar said, but the plan was dropped when they suspected that Pakistani security services were following Q.
Instead Canadian Momin Khawaja allegedly worked on remote controlled detonation for a December attack but it was claimed he took until January to get the device working.
He visited London on February 20 to explain it to the gang and when Canadian police raided his home in Ontario, they allegedly found a matching pair of home-made transmitter and receiver circuit boards among the computer equipment in a second floor room.
Khawaja was said to have written an email to the others on January 25 2004 saying: “Praise the most high. We got the devices working.”
In a statement issued after the verdict was announced, the Director General of the Security Service, Jonathan Evans, said: "I welcome this outcome. It is recognition of the hard work put in by my staff, the police and other agencies, and represents another plot prevented - one of a growing number of potentially devastating attacks that the Service has stopped."
Downing Street said today that the foiling of the fertiliser bomb plot represented "a success" which had saved "many lives".
Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman also urged against jumping to the conclusion that the 7/7 attacks could have been prevented in the light of new evidence released after today's convictions.
"We should recognise this for what it is," he said.
"It is a success. It is the prevention of a very serious set of attacks. As a result many lives have been saved."
Amid calls for an independent inquiry, the spokesman added: "We shouldn't jump from the fact that new evidence has now been made public to the assumption that in some way 7/7 could have been prevented."
He added that there had already been an independent inquiry by the Intelligence and Security Committee, which had been kept abreast of new information throughout the trial.
Mr Blair today asked the committee, chaired by Paul Murphy, to check again that there was no information which had been overlooked, the spokesman said. "Just to make absolutely sure, the Prime Minister has asked them to do the task one more time."
telegraph.co.uk
