British Court Convicts Three in Plot to Blow Up Airliners
By JOHN F. BURNS | September 7, 2009
LONDON — After two trials and the largest counterterrorism investigation in Britain’s history, three men were found guilty on Monday of plotting to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners on a single day with liquid explosives smuggled aboard in soft-drink bottles and detonated by devices powered with AA batteries.
The convictions came three years after the global airline industry was thrown into chaos by the plot. The bombers’ plan to drain plastic soft-drink bottles with syringes and refill them with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a bleaching agent also used as a propellant for rockets, led to new measures prohibiting passengers from carrying all but small quantities of liquids and creams onto flights.
With those measures still in force and causing backups at airport security checkpoints around the world, the police and intelligence agencies in Britain and the United States had waited anxiously for verdicts in the six-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court in London, where eight men were accused of conspiracy to stage the airliner bombings.
Prosecutors said the plot could have killed at least 1,500 people aboard the targeted planes, which by that measure would have made it second only to the Sept. 11 attacks as the most serious terrorist plot in modern history.
“Apart from massive loss of life, these attacks would have had enormous worldwide economic and political significance,” John McDowall, Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism chief, said after the verdicts.
In Washington, the Obama administration praised the verdict on Monday.
“British authorities have worked diligently to investigate and prosecute those involved in the 2006 aviation plot,” Mike Hammer, a National Security Council spokesman, said via e-mail. “We congratulate them on those efforts and extend our thanks to the British government for seeing these efforts through to today’s conclusion.”
Last year, a trial failed to reach verdicts on the airliner-bombing charges against the defendants then being tried. So the stakes were especially high in the second trial for the main agencies involved in uncovering the London plot, including Scotland Yard and Britain’s secret intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, as well as the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I., among American agencies involved.
The significance was all the greater because there have been no trials yet of anyone directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
After arrests in the liquid-explosives case were made in August 2006, documents found at the plotters’ homes and on a computer memory stick belonging to the plot ringleader showed that they had earmarked airline schedules for seven flights leaving London for New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto, with aircraft operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada. Evidence at the trial showed that the plot aimed to detonate the bombs nearly simultaneously, with the aircraft over the Atlantic.
The plotters’ intent, intelligence officials said, was to show that security measures adopted after Sept. 11 were insufficient to foil the kind of low-technology, “asymmetric” attacks favored by Islamic extremists in their war with the West. Evidence at the London trial showed that several of the plotters, like those of Sept. 11, had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan for indoctrination and training by extremist groups linked to Al Qaeda.
The jury found three men guilty of conspiring to kill passengers and crew members aboard the flights: Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, named by prosecutors as the plot’s ringleader; Tanvir Hussain, 28; and Assad Sarwar, 29, who was identified at the trial as the “quartermaster” of the plot, responsible for acquiring the explosives, detonators and other equipment and assembling them at a “bomb factory” in a London suburb.
A total of eight men were in the dock during the six-month trial. Four of the eight — Ibrahim Savant, 28; Arafat Waheed Khan, 28; Waheed Zaman, 25; and Donald Stewart-Whyte, 23 — were found not guilty of plotting to bomb the airliners. The eighth man, Umar Islam, 31, was found guilty of an alternative charge of conspiracy to commit murder, the charge on which Mr. Ali, Mr. Hussain and Mr. Sarwar were convicted at the first trial that ended in September 2008.
The men who were convicted will be sentenced Monday.
The jury in the second trial failed to reach a verdict on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder in the case of Mr. Savant, Mr. Khan and Mr. Zaman. It acquitted Mr. Stewart-Whyte, who was said by defense lawyers at the trial to have converted from Christianity to Islam only four months before his arrest.
The Crown Prosecution Service, responsible for filing charges in criminal cases, said after the verdicts that it would review the jury’s failure to reach verdicts in the three cases of conspiracy to commit murder, and decide whether to seek a third trial in the case.
Scotland Yard officials estimated the total cost of the case at more than $60 million, another factor that weighed heavily as the verdicts came in. Over the weekend, there had been fears the trial would end, like the first, with a hung jury on the key charges of plotting to bomb airliners. As the jury reached the end of a second week of deliberations, the judge called the jurors into court on Friday and told them he would accept 10-to-2 majority verdicts if they were unable to reach unanimous decisions, allowable under British law.
Behind the scenes, the case caused major strains between American and British intelligence agencies and investigators. The Americans were deeply involved from the start because of the role that American electronic intercepts played in uncovering the plot, and because the principal targets were American planes and passengers.
But officials familiar with the case said there were bitter disputes over the arrests in 2006, with the Americans saying they believed that the British, who staked out the conspirators for months, waited too long to round them up, raising the risk of an attack. The British, by contrast, were angered by the American pressure, which they said forced them to make the arrests before they had all the evidence necessary to ensure convictions.
A major stumbling block at both trials was that British court procedures do not allow the use of intercepted telephone conversations and other electronic intercepts. Television documentaries shown in Britain have included secret police videotapes showing some of the plotters engaged in what appeared to be preparatory work on the bombs at the suburban London bomb factory and discussing the destructive potential of the bombs.
Mr. Ali and several other defendants testified at the trial that they had never intended to bomb airliners, but planned what they called “a political stunt,” involving setting off minor explosions in garbage bins outside airline offices in Terminal Three of Heathrow airport, the London base for the three airlines they earmarked in the flight schedules. Their purpose, they said, was to frighten people, not to kill them.
But experiments by British explosives experts cited in court found that the bombs the plotters planned to use could blow aircraft apart at 30,000 feet.
Prosecutors showed the court extensive evidence showing how the men bought material for the bombs, and how some of it, including the hydrogen peroxide, was hidden in woods outside a town northwest of London. The jury was also shown so-called martyrdom videos prepared by two of the plotters, Mr. Ali and Mr. Hussain.
A common theme in the videos was exacting revenge on Britain and the United States for their interference in Muslim countries, especially the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We have warned you enough,” Mr. Ali said. “We have warned you again and again to leave our lands.” In his video, Mr. Hussain said his only regret was that “I can’t come back and do this again and again until people come to their senses and realize, ‘Don’t mess with the Muslims.’ ”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
