3 Sentenced in London for Airline Plot
By JOHN F. BURNS | July 12, 2010
LONDON — Three men convicted last week of involvement in a 2006 plot to bomb trans-Atlantic airliners were sentenced in a London court on Monday to life imprisonment, with the judge telling them they would serve a minimum of 20 years for their roles as “foot soldiers.”
The sentencing brought an end to an exhaustive court process that began in 2008 — an initial trial and two retrials — and concluded a terrorism case that British officials have described as the longest, costliest and most serious in the country’s history. The plot detailed in court involved suicide bombers who were to bring down at least seven airliners heading from London to the United States and Canada on a single day with explosions created by mixing liquids carried aboard in plastic soft-drink bottles.
In all, eight men were sentenced to life terms for their roles in a scheme that prosecutors said could have taken 2,000 lives, and possibly many more. Evidence not presented at trial because of a ban on intercept evidence in British courts showed that the plotters were caught by electronic bugs discussing the recruitment of as many as 18 suicide bombers. When arrested, the plot’s ringleader in Britain, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, was carrying a computer memory device listing seven flights earmarked for attack.
Lawyers for the three men sentenced on Monday — Arafat Waheed Khan, 29; Ibrahim Savant, 29; and Waheed Zaman, 26 — told the Woolwich Crown Court in south London that they had been led into terrorism, and had their Muslim faith corrupted, by Mr. Ali, 29, a computer engineer, who had known two of the three men since they were at school together in east London. Mr. Ali is serving a life sentence in the case, as are four other men.
The judge, Sir Timothy Holroyde, said he accepted that the three men were recruited by Mr. Ali, whom he called “a very powerful personality.” But he noted their full participation in the plot, telling them that each of them had planned “to kill members of the general public and yourselves by acting as a suicide bomber” and had recorded “martyrdom videos” in which they had spoken of themselves as “blessed by the opportunity to take part in that mission.”
“In this dreadful conspiracy, the intended role of the foot soldier was to blow himself up and to kill and maim an uncertain but potentially large number of men, women and children,” the judge said.
American intercepts of telephone and e-mail traffic between the plotters and contacts in Pakistan linked to Al Qaeda were crucial to uncovering the plot, and provided Scotland Yard with leads that led to a surveillance operation in Britain that kept the plotters under observation for several months.
But the case ended up causing deep strains between British and American terrorism investigators. Scotland Yard blamed the Americans for the premature arrest in Pakistan of a British man regarded as the plot’s mastermind, Rashid Rauf. That arrest forced a hasty roundup of the remaining suspects in August 2006 that British investigators said weakened the case against the men at the ensuing trials. Mr. Rauf escaped from Pakistani custody in December 2007, but was reported by American and Pakistani officials to have been killed in an area along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan 11 months later by a missile fired from an American drone.
A first trial in London ended with none of the eight defendants convicted of the principal charge of plotting to blow up airliners. A second trial led to three of the men, including Mr. Ali, being convicted on that charge, and two others on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder. At the third trial, the three men sentenced on Monday were found guilty of the same charge. All eight men received life terms, and four other men over the course of the trials were convicted of lesser offenses related to the plot.
