Four July 21 plotters jailed for life
guardian.co.uk
Peter Walker and agencies
Wednesday July 11, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
The convicted men (clockwise from top left): Muktar Said Ibrahim, Yassin Omar, Hussain Osman and Ramzi Mohammed. Photograph: Metropolitan Police/PA
The four convicted July 21 bombers were today jailed for life for an al-Qaida-led plot to murder dozens of people on London's public transport network.
Muktar Said Ibrahim, Yassin Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Hussain Osman could not be considered for release for 40 years, judge Mr Justice Fulford QC said.
Their plan had been "a viable, indeed a very nearly successful, attempt at mass murder", he told Woolwich crown court in south-east London.
"It is clear that at least 50 people would have died, hundreds of people would have been wounded.
"Thousands would have had their lives permanently damaged, disfigured or otherwise, whether they were Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, agnostic or atheist."
The plot not only mirrored the attack on July 7, two weeks earlier - when four suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 other people on a bus and three tubes trains - but was clearly connected to it, the judge added.
"I have no doubt that they were both part of an al-Qaida-inspired and controlled sequence of attacks," Mr Justice Fulford said.
The trial had heard how Ibrahim, the ringleader of the plot, had been in Pakistan at the same time as two of the July 7 bombers. This was "no coincidence, in my view", the judge said.
"It seems to me that not only did the defendant do this with the full knowledge of what had happened on July 7, but that their preparations were organised as part of a parallel but separate team," he added.
Having seen the results of the July 7 attacks, the four plotters "knew exactly what the result" of their own attack would be, the judge noted.
"The family and friends of the dead and the injured, the hundreds, indeed thousands, captured underground in terrifying circumstances - the smoke, the screams of the wounded and the dying - this each defendant knew."
On Monday, Ibrahim, 29, of Stoke Newington, north London; 26-year-old Omar, of New Southgate, north London; Mohammed, 25, of North Kensington, west London; and 28-year-old Osman, of no fixed address, were found guilty of conspiracy to murder after a six-month trial.
As the sentences were read out, Ibrahim shook his head slightly, Omar stared at the judge and Osman clutched a Qur'an. Only Mohammed appeared to be trying to contain his emotions.
The jury was discharged yesterday after failing to reach a decision on two other defendants, Manfo Kwaku Asiedu and Adel Yahya, both of whom deny conspiracy to murder.
Mr Asiedu, 34, of no fixed address, and 24-year-old Mr Yahya, of Tottenham, north London, will face a retrial, prosecutors said today.
None of the four convicted men's homemade hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour bombs, which were carried in rucksacks, detonated properly. The judge said that, after hearing scientific evidence about why the bombs failed, his view was that the plot had come "very close to succeeding".
Ibrahim insisted the bombs were never intended to hurt anyone and were meant to be a protest against the Iraq war. However, the Crown Prosecution Service today said it was clear that the four men had planned to "kill and main on a massive scale".
"They could have been in no doubt as to the consequences of their actions," Susan Hemming, head of the CPS counterterrorism division, told reporters outside the court.
Ibrahim, who admitted making the bombs, grew up in Eritrea and came to the UK in 1990. He attempted to blow up a bus in Shoreditch, east London.
Police and intelligence agencies have faced criticism over the fact that he was able to lead the plot despite having come to their attention several times beforehand.
At various points in 2004, he was photographed by surveillance officers while on a camping trip in the Lake District, was arrested for distributing extremist Islamist literature and was stopped by Special Branch officers on his way to Pakistan.
Somali-born Omar tried to detonate his bomb on a tube train near Warren Street station, in central London. It was his north London flat that was used by the plotters as a base in which to make the bombs.
Mohammed, also originally from Somalia, claimed he had only been forced into the plot at the last minute.
He attempted to blow up a carriage on a tube train near Stockwell station, in south London, and was pictured on CCTV footage turning so that his bomb faced a woman and her nine-month-old son before trying to set it off.
Osman, who was born in Ethiopia and came to the UK via Italy, tried to detonate his bomb close to Shepherd's Bush station, in west London.
The four were arrested in the days and weeks following the attempted attacks, Ibrahim and Mohammed at the latter's west London flat, Omar in Birmingham and Osman in Italy. |
