Wednesday, September 16, 2009

NYT : Life Terms for Plot to Bomb Trans-Atlantic Flights From London

Life Terms for Plot to Bomb Trans-Atlantic Flights From London

By JOHN F. BURNS | September 14, 2009

LONDON — A High Court judge on Monday imposed minimum prison terms of 32 to 40 years on three men convicted last week, after two trials, of plotting to smuggle liquid explosives onto at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners heading to the United States and Canada from London, with the aim of blowing the aircraft apart in midair.

The judge, Sir Richard Henriques, called the plot “the most grave and wicked conspiracy ever proven within this jurisdiction” and compared it, in its potential for inflicting mass loss of life, to the Sept. 11 attacks. He gave all three men the maximum of life imprisonment but followed standard British practice by specifying the minimum period each man would have to serve before becoming eligible for parole.

The plot’s ringleader in Britain, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, was given a minimum term of 40 years. Assad Sarwar, 29, received a 36-year minimum after he was identified at the trials as the chemical expert and “quartermaster” of the plot, responsible for acquiring materials, including the explosive concentration of hydrogen peroxide that would have been injected into plastic soft-drink bottles intended to serve as bombs.

A third man, Tanvir Hussain, 28, named by prosecutors as Mr. Ali’s right-hand man, was told that he would have to serve at least 32 years.

Judge Henriques, 65, known in the British judiciary for his tough sentencing in an era when the trend has often been toward greater leniency, was unsparing as he passed sentences on the plotters, saying they had amassed enough explosives to make 20 bombs. He aligned himself squarely with the prosecutors, who were faced with defense arguments that the plotters had intended only to set off minor explosions at a terminal at London’s Heathrow Airport to attract attention to Muslim grievances over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and not to kill people or attack airliners.

“The intention was to perpetrate a terrorist outrage that would stand alongside the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in history,” the judge said. “I’m satisfied that the plot would have succeeded but for the intervention of the police and the security service.” He added, “Had this conspiracy not been interrupted, a massive loss of life would almost certainly have resulted — and if the detonation was over land, the number of victims would have been even greater still.”

As the judge passed sentence at Woolwich Crown Court in south London on Mr. Ali, the plot leader, he glanced down at a small book he was holding but was otherwise expressionless, the BBC reported. The BBC reporter said that Mr. Sarwar and Mr. Hussain were similarly undemonstrative. The reporter did not identify the book held by Mr. Ali.

The sentences, among the harshest ever imposed in Britain in a murder plot in which nobody was killed, seemed likely to ease the sometimes severe strains that had developed between the United States and Britain over the case. The friction was compounded when the five other defendants in the trial were acquitted of plotting to bomb airliners; one of the five, Umar Islam, 31, was convicted on the lesser charge of conspiracy to commit murder.

Another of the five, Donald Stewart-Whyte, 23, was acquitted on both charges, but the jury did not reach a verdict on the murder conspiracy charge against the remaining three, and they will learn after a hearing on Oct. 5 whether they will face a third trial on the charge.

Global interest in the case, which ran for 17 months over the course of the two trials, has been high, partly because discovery of the plot in August 2006 led to worldwide, time-consuming restrictions at airport security checkpoints that are still in place on the liquids and creams passengers can carry aboard aircraft.

American involvement was pervasive from the start and led to bitter confrontations between officials in London and Washington — not least when the first trial ended last September with the jury convicting Mr. Ali, Mr. Sarwar and Mr. Hussain of conspiracy to commit murder but not reaching a verdict on the main charge of plotting to attack airliners, an outcome some American and British officials attributed to poor handling of the prosecution’s case.

There was also unease over the fact that British courts, unlike their American counterparts, do not allow the use of electronic intercepts as evidence, voiding for court purposes extensive recordings of telephone conversations in which the plotters discussed their plans.

Mr. Islam, the fourth man convicted of a charge last week, received a 22-year term for conspiracy to murder. He had been declared not guilty of the aircraft bombing charge after the jury concluded he was not aware that aircraft were the targets.

All four men sentenced on Monday and the three men facing the possibility of a third trial — Ibrahim Savant, 28; Arafat Waheed Khan, 28; and Waheed Zaman, 25 — are British citizens with family ties in Pakistan, where prosecutors said the plot was masterminded by a British-born man with Pakistani origins, Rashid Rauf.

Mr. Rauf’s involvement was another flashpoint between American and British officials investigating the plot. It was his arrest in Pakistan — at the urging of American officials, as British intelligence officers have said — that set off a chain reaction that prompted the British authorities to round up the plotters on Aug. 9, 2006, at a time when British investigators thought that they lacked enough evidence to guarantee successful prosecutions.

Mr. Rauf’s role in the case threatened at one point to turn into farce. Known as an alcohol-drinking troublemaker at school, he fled Britain in 2002 when his uncle was brutally murdered in Birmingham and he was identified as a suspect. British intelligence officials have said he may have had links to the London transit bombings in 2005 in which 56 people, including four suicide bombers, were killed.

After his arrest in Pakistan in 2006, Britain sought his extradition in the airliner bombing case but he escaped from Pakistani police officers. American officials have said he was eventually killed in a missile strike in northern Pakistan last November.