Liquid bomb plot trio jailed for life
Their plot forced airlines to bring in tough and unpopular rules and as Simon Israel reports in September 2009 the three men behind the failed liquid bomb attacks were jailed for a total of 108 years.
The judge said the three had planned an atrocity on a par with the 11 September attacks and that it was a “grave and wicked conspiracy”.
The three men had been convicted of planning to kill thousands by detonating liquid bombs on a series of flights bound for the US.
Airliner bomb plot ringleader Abdulla Ahmed Ali was jailed for life with a minimum of 40 years today.
The judge jailed Assad Sarwar for life with a minimum of 36 years. Tanvir Hussain was also jailed for life with a minimum of 32 years.
“A grave and wicked conspiracy.” Mr Justice Henriques
British-born extremist Ali, the leader of an al-Qaida inspired terror cell, planned to detonate home-made liquid bombs on board flights bound for major north American cities.
Ali, of Walthamstow, east London, was found guilty along with Sarwar and Hussain of conspiracy to murder on a mass scale by detonating bombs on airliners following the largest-ever counter-terrorism operation in the UK.
Trial judge Mr Justice Henriques said the gang was planning a “grave” terrorist atrocity.
He said they would have succeeded without the intervention of the police and security services.
Counter-terrorist police and the security services spent more than £35m foiling the plot and bringing Ali and the others to justice.
The arrest of the gang in August 2006 sparked tight restrictions on carrying liquids on to aircraft which initially caused travel chaos.
British-born Ali was inspired by the 7 July 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 was found guilty of conspiracy to murder last September, but the previous jury failed to reach verdicts on the airline plot.
He 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.
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 also discovered on a computer memory stick.
The jury at the airline bomb plot trial found Donald Stewart-Whyte not guilty of conspiring to murder by blowing up planes. Simon Israel put six written questions to him via his solicitor.
He responded: “I was a stupid young immature boy, and that is the reason I am in custody by my choice now, because the first person to admit my wrong doing is myself.
“I am undecided as to what was going on. Only God knows what the future holds. But I hope no blood is needed to be shed?”
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