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Brought up to love cricket, tutored to create carnage
JASON CUMMING ([email protected])
THEIR suburban upbringings appear unremarkable and backgrounds epitomise modern-day life in Britain.
Omar Khyam was captain of his school cricket team. The product of a secular middle-class household, he loved Manchester United and fish and chips. His grandfather fought in the British Army during the Second World War.
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Anthony Garcia was an aspiring model who fashioned himself an Ali G-type figure as a teenager. The rap music and basketball fan westernised his name from Rahman Adam to help his fledgling catwalk career.
Jawad Akbar secretly married a non-Muslim and studied multimedia at Brunel University.
Waheed Mahmood, a father of four, installed gas meters for Transco, and Salahuddin Amin was brought up in Luton before deciding to live in Pakistan after earning a university degree.
Last night, these five men were beginning life sentences after being found guilty of plotting a bombing campaign to rival the 11 September attacks on New York.
The fiery sermons of radical Muslim clerics which fuelled a hatred for western ways appear to have been the common denominator in the transformation of such seemingly "normal" individuals into Britain's first home-grown terrorist cell.
Khyam, 25, was the ringleader of the British al-Qaeda cell - the so-called "Crawley Mob" - which intended to use more than half a ton of chemical fertiliser to bring terror to the UK in "something bigger than 9/11".
His boyhood dreams of playing cricket for England or Sussex had been replaced by plans to kill hundreds by bombing targets including the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent and the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London.
One of Khyam's henchmen was recorded discussing blowing up a nightclub because no one could say "slags dancing around" were innocent.
Inspired by the World Trade Centre atrocities, the gang talked of bringing down a plane and bombing the Houses of Parliament, and toyed with the idea of using a nuclear weapon.
A year-long trial at London's Old Bailey was told that the cell discussed poisoning football fans with spiked beer and contaminated takeaways sold from vans. They also planned to hit gas and electricity supplies.
The son of a wealthy businessman, Khyam said the "UK needed to be hit because 9/11 had happened in America and nothing had happened in the UK".
He boasted of taking orders from the al-Qaeda chief Abdul al-Hadi al-Iraqi, number three in the terrorist organisation's hierarchy. Al-Hadi is now being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Mostly students of Pakistani descent, the five grew up mainly in and around the Sussex commuter town of Crawley.
The path that would eventually lead them to terrorist training camps in Pakistan and prompt the biggest police operation of its kind in British history started at fringe meetings at universities where they were addressed by extremist preachers.
After volunteering to fight in Afghanistan, they were told they would be more use to al-Qaeda in Britain.
British support for the war in Iraq later made the UK a legitimate target in their eyes.
It remains unclear exactly what diverted Khyam from a hard-working pupil and promising cricketer to a would-be teenage jihadist.
His grandfather had served as colonel in the British Army before moving to the UK in the 1970s, and when he was a child the family seldom attended services at the local mosque.
Khyam was sent to a secondary school that was predominantly white, as opposed to the local school where there were many Asians. But from about the age of 15, he became more and more interested in religion. He was also secretly attending meetings of the radical Al Muhajiroun group.
Several years before the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that are blamed for inspiring the post-9/11 generation of terrorists, he became obsessed with taking part in jihad, or holy war.
He ran away from home to Pakistan at the age of 17 and found his way to a training camp for foreigners who wanted to receive military training for Kashmir. The first his family knew was when he called them from thousands of miles away.
Khyam told his trial that during three months at the camp in early 2000, he learned "everything I needed for guerrilla warfare in Kashmir", including weapons training in AK47s, pistols, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper rifles.
Members of his family, who were in Pakistani military intelligence, eventually traced him and sent him home.
But he returned the following year for a friend's wedding and slipped over the border to meet the Taleban in Afghanistan.
The key plotters later also came together at a secret military training camp in the mountains of north-western Pakistan, where they tested fertiliser bombs in a trial run.
Khyam was aged just 22 at the time of his arrest in March 2004 - in the final stages of preparing a major al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist attack.
The gang's plan was foiled by intercepted internet chatroom conversations and the discovery of the fertiliser in a storage depot in west London. At just under two-thirds of a tonne, if all the fertiliser had been used in one device, it would have been comparable in size to the IRA's Docklands bombs and to the abortive attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in Manhattan in 1993.
Dubbed Operation Crevice, it was the biggest anti-terrorism investigation of its kind in the UK at the time.
A staggering 34,000 man-hours of surveillance took place, with 7,600 people involved in the investigation.
Officers secretly replaced the potential explosive with an inert substance, planted a policewoman in the reception of the storage facility and bugged the suspects.
But investigators soon feared they could be about to remove the fertiliser to manufacture a bomb.
Police were also aware that Khyam, who was codenamed "All Together" by the security services, was apparently making plans to leave the country before the attack was carried out.
This tactic had been a feature of previous al-Qaeda attacks and rang alarm bells with senior counter-terrorism officers on the case.
The final decision to move towards the arrest phase of the operation was made after 19 March, 2004, when surveillance officers heard some "worrying" snippets of conversation among the cell.
As anti-terrorism detectives and MI5 agents decided the plot was near completion, they moved in during a series of 28 raids on 30 March.
Yesterday, after a record nearly 135 hours of jury deliberation over a 27-day span, five of those arrested were convicted of conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life.
Garcia, 25, of Barkingside, east London, Mahmood, 35, of Crawley, and Khyam were told they would serve at least 20 years of a life sentence.
Amin, 32, of Luton, and Akbar 23, of Crawley, will serve a minimum of 17.5 years.
Judge Sir Michael Astill told the plotters: "You have betrayed this country that has given you every opportunity.
"All of you may never be released," the judge said. "It is not a foregone conclusion.
"You spoke enthusiastically and with pleasure in the slaughter of innocents. You are ruthless, devious, heartless and dangerous, and it is a matter for the future whether you are ever fit for release."
Khyam's brother, Shujah Mahmood, 20, from Crawley, and Nabeel Hussain, 22, of Horley, Surrey, were both cleared of the conspiracy.
The defendants denied there was a plot. Some said they did not know what the fertiliser was, that they were only interested in sending money and supplies to fighters in Kashmir and Afghanistan, or that they were duped.
But prosecutor David Waters, QC, yesterday also raised the spectre that not everyone involved in the plot had been caught.
Two further conspirators, Mohammed Junaid Babar and Mohammed Momin Khawaja, were arrested in the United States and Canada.
Babar admitted his role in the plot after being arrested by the FBI and became a vital prosecution witness.
Khawaja is awaiting trial in Canada.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism branch, yesterday said: "This was not a group of youthful idealists. They were trained, dedicated, ruthless terrorists who were obviously planning to carry out an attack against the British public.
"If these men had succeeded in achieving their goal, there is no doubt at all that the carnage would have been immense," said the police chief.
Supergrass told of terror camp links
AN AMERICAN supergrass who attended overseas terrorist training camps with Omar Khyam was the star witness during the bombing trial.
Security was tight as Mohammed Junaid Babar was brought to the UK to give evidence. He was led into the courtroom handcuffed to an FBI agent, and dominated the OId Bailey during hearings spread over a month with his heavy frame and mid-Atlantic accent.
In June 2004, Babar had pleaded guilty in the United States to charges of assisting al-Qaeda terrorism. Three of the charges had involved being part of Khyam's terrorist cell.
Babar, facing 70 years in jail, had agreed to give evidence against the Britons in the hope of a reduced sentence. He was given immunity from prosecution in the UK in return for his testimony.
Babar told the court that after dropping out of university in the US, he became radicalised by internet sites of the London-based al-Muhajiroun group, which has now been banned.
Just a week after his mother escaped from the ninth floor of the first of the World Trade Centre towers to be attacked by suicide bombers on 11 September, 2001, he was on a plane to side with al-Qaeda.
He arrived in Pakistan after a stay in London, during which he made contacts and received money from al-Muhajiroun, he said. Speaking the local dialect around the border regions, Babar found himself a key player when western terrorism recruits arrived.
Babar said he met the al-Qaeda chain of command involved with the Britons who went on to form the fertiliser bomb cell.
On trips to England, he said he had been further influenced by Abu Hamza, the radical preacher now serving a prison sentence.
Babar helped to set up the terrorist training camp in Malakand which was attended by Khyam and other terrorism suspects.
He became involved in two conspiracies to murder the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, in 2002 - crimes which could have seen him facing the death penalty before his FBI pact.
In April 2004, following the arrest of the suspected cell in London, he was picked up by the FBI on his way to a cab driving school in New York.
Babar and his family are now under the US witness protection programme.
He is due to give evidence against a Canadian, Mohammed Momin Khawaja. He will then be sentenced and given a new identity after serving a reduced prison term.
Babar maintained at the Old Bailey trial that he still holds his radical beliefs, and denied claims he was a CIA plant.
SHENAI RAIF
PLOT TO SHOOT DOWN PLANE
AN AL-QAEDA terror plot to shoot down a passenger jet with a rocket launcher was foiled by police and MI5 less than six months after the 7/7 bombings, it was revealed yesterday.
A British Muslim linked to the fertiliser terror cell was behind the plot - details of which could not be reported until now due to restrictions surrounding that case.
In the wake of the 7 July bombings, he had conducted negotiations to buy rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles when he was arrested by anti-terror officers. Plans for an electricity substation - which, if bombed, could have caused blackouts across London - were also found at his home.
Kazi Rahman, 29, was jailed for nine years last year after he admitted trying to buy terrorist weapons. He was a contact of Mohammed Junaid Babar, the "supergrass" in the fertiliser trial, and called himself Haleem or Abdul Salim.
JASON CUMMING ([email protected])
THEIR suburban upbringings appear unremarkable and backgrounds epitomise modern-day life in Britain.
Omar Khyam was captain of his school cricket team. The product of a secular middle-class household, he loved Manchester United and fish and chips. His grandfather fought in the British Army during the Second World War.
Advert for The Scotsman Digital Archive
Anthony Garcia was an aspiring model who fashioned himself an Ali G-type figure as a teenager. The rap music and basketball fan westernised his name from Rahman Adam to help his fledgling catwalk career.
Jawad Akbar secretly married a non-Muslim and studied multimedia at Brunel University.
Waheed Mahmood, a father of four, installed gas meters for Transco, and Salahuddin Amin was brought up in Luton before deciding to live in Pakistan after earning a university degree.
Last night, these five men were beginning life sentences after being found guilty of plotting a bombing campaign to rival the 11 September attacks on New York.
The fiery sermons of radical Muslim clerics which fuelled a hatred for western ways appear to have been the common denominator in the transformation of such seemingly "normal" individuals into Britain's first home-grown terrorist cell.
Khyam, 25, was the ringleader of the British al-Qaeda cell - the so-called "Crawley Mob" - which intended to use more than half a ton of chemical fertiliser to bring terror to the UK in "something bigger than 9/11".
His boyhood dreams of playing cricket for England or Sussex had been replaced by plans to kill hundreds by bombing targets including the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent and the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London.
One of Khyam's henchmen was recorded discussing blowing up a nightclub because no one could say "slags dancing around" were innocent.
Inspired by the World Trade Centre atrocities, the gang talked of bringing down a plane and bombing the Houses of Parliament, and toyed with the idea of using a nuclear weapon.
A year-long trial at London's Old Bailey was told that the cell discussed poisoning football fans with spiked beer and contaminated takeaways sold from vans. They also planned to hit gas and electricity supplies.
The son of a wealthy businessman, Khyam said the "UK needed to be hit because 9/11 had happened in America and nothing had happened in the UK".
He boasted of taking orders from the al-Qaeda chief Abdul al-Hadi al-Iraqi, number three in the terrorist organisation's hierarchy. Al-Hadi is now being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Mostly students of Pakistani descent, the five grew up mainly in and around the Sussex commuter town of Crawley.
The path that would eventually lead them to terrorist training camps in Pakistan and prompt the biggest police operation of its kind in British history started at fringe meetings at universities where they were addressed by extremist preachers.
After volunteering to fight in Afghanistan, they were told they would be more use to al-Qaeda in Britain.
British support for the war in Iraq later made the UK a legitimate target in their eyes.
It remains unclear exactly what diverted Khyam from a hard-working pupil and promising cricketer to a would-be teenage jihadist.
His grandfather had served as colonel in the British Army before moving to the UK in the 1970s, and when he was a child the family seldom attended services at the local mosque.
Khyam was sent to a secondary school that was predominantly white, as opposed to the local school where there were many Asians. But from about the age of 15, he became more and more interested in religion. He was also secretly attending meetings of the radical Al Muhajiroun group.
Several years before the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that are blamed for inspiring the post-9/11 generation of terrorists, he became obsessed with taking part in jihad, or holy war.
He ran away from home to Pakistan at the age of 17 and found his way to a training camp for foreigners who wanted to receive military training for Kashmir. The first his family knew was when he called them from thousands of miles away.
Khyam told his trial that during three months at the camp in early 2000, he learned "everything I needed for guerrilla warfare in Kashmir", including weapons training in AK47s, pistols, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper rifles.
Members of his family, who were in Pakistani military intelligence, eventually traced him and sent him home.
But he returned the following year for a friend's wedding and slipped over the border to meet the Taleban in Afghanistan.
The key plotters later also came together at a secret military training camp in the mountains of north-western Pakistan, where they tested fertiliser bombs in a trial run.
Khyam was aged just 22 at the time of his arrest in March 2004 - in the final stages of preparing a major al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist attack.
The gang's plan was foiled by intercepted internet chatroom conversations and the discovery of the fertiliser in a storage depot in west London. At just under two-thirds of a tonne, if all the fertiliser had been used in one device, it would have been comparable in size to the IRA's Docklands bombs and to the abortive attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in Manhattan in 1993.
Dubbed Operation Crevice, it was the biggest anti-terrorism investigation of its kind in the UK at the time.
A staggering 34,000 man-hours of surveillance took place, with 7,600 people involved in the investigation.
Officers secretly replaced the potential explosive with an inert substance, planted a policewoman in the reception of the storage facility and bugged the suspects.
But investigators soon feared they could be about to remove the fertiliser to manufacture a bomb.
Police were also aware that Khyam, who was codenamed "All Together" by the security services, was apparently making plans to leave the country before the attack was carried out.
This tactic had been a feature of previous al-Qaeda attacks and rang alarm bells with senior counter-terrorism officers on the case.
The final decision to move towards the arrest phase of the operation was made after 19 March, 2004, when surveillance officers heard some "worrying" snippets of conversation among the cell.
As anti-terrorism detectives and MI5 agents decided the plot was near completion, they moved in during a series of 28 raids on 30 March.
Yesterday, after a record nearly 135 hours of jury deliberation over a 27-day span, five of those arrested were convicted of conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life.
Garcia, 25, of Barkingside, east London, Mahmood, 35, of Crawley, and Khyam were told they would serve at least 20 years of a life sentence.
Amin, 32, of Luton, and Akbar 23, of Crawley, will serve a minimum of 17.5 years.
Judge Sir Michael Astill told the plotters: "You have betrayed this country that has given you every opportunity.
"All of you may never be released," the judge said. "It is not a foregone conclusion.
"You spoke enthusiastically and with pleasure in the slaughter of innocents. You are ruthless, devious, heartless and dangerous, and it is a matter for the future whether you are ever fit for release."
Khyam's brother, Shujah Mahmood, 20, from Crawley, and Nabeel Hussain, 22, of Horley, Surrey, were both cleared of the conspiracy.
The defendants denied there was a plot. Some said they did not know what the fertiliser was, that they were only interested in sending money and supplies to fighters in Kashmir and Afghanistan, or that they were duped.
But prosecutor David Waters, QC, yesterday also raised the spectre that not everyone involved in the plot had been caught.
Two further conspirators, Mohammed Junaid Babar and Mohammed Momin Khawaja, were arrested in the United States and Canada.
Babar admitted his role in the plot after being arrested by the FBI and became a vital prosecution witness.
Khawaja is awaiting trial in Canada.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism branch, yesterday said: "This was not a group of youthful idealists. They were trained, dedicated, ruthless terrorists who were obviously planning to carry out an attack against the British public.
"If these men had succeeded in achieving their goal, there is no doubt at all that the carnage would have been immense," said the police chief.
Supergrass told of terror camp links
AN AMERICAN supergrass who attended overseas terrorist training camps with Omar Khyam was the star witness during the bombing trial.
Security was tight as Mohammed Junaid Babar was brought to the UK to give evidence. He was led into the courtroom handcuffed to an FBI agent, and dominated the OId Bailey during hearings spread over a month with his heavy frame and mid-Atlantic accent.
In June 2004, Babar had pleaded guilty in the United States to charges of assisting al-Qaeda terrorism. Three of the charges had involved being part of Khyam's terrorist cell.
Babar, facing 70 years in jail, had agreed to give evidence against the Britons in the hope of a reduced sentence. He was given immunity from prosecution in the UK in return for his testimony.
Babar told the court that after dropping out of university in the US, he became radicalised by internet sites of the London-based al-Muhajiroun group, which has now been banned.
Just a week after his mother escaped from the ninth floor of the first of the World Trade Centre towers to be attacked by suicide bombers on 11 September, 2001, he was on a plane to side with al-Qaeda.
He arrived in Pakistan after a stay in London, during which he made contacts and received money from al-Muhajiroun, he said. Speaking the local dialect around the border regions, Babar found himself a key player when western terrorism recruits arrived.
Babar said he met the al-Qaeda chain of command involved with the Britons who went on to form the fertiliser bomb cell.
On trips to England, he said he had been further influenced by Abu Hamza, the radical preacher now serving a prison sentence.
Babar helped to set up the terrorist training camp in Malakand which was attended by Khyam and other terrorism suspects.
He became involved in two conspiracies to murder the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, in 2002 - crimes which could have seen him facing the death penalty before his FBI pact.
In April 2004, following the arrest of the suspected cell in London, he was picked up by the FBI on his way to a cab driving school in New York.
Babar and his family are now under the US witness protection programme.
He is due to give evidence against a Canadian, Mohammed Momin Khawaja. He will then be sentenced and given a new identity after serving a reduced prison term.
Babar maintained at the Old Bailey trial that he still holds his radical beliefs, and denied claims he was a CIA plant.
SHENAI RAIF
PLOT TO SHOOT DOWN PLANE
AN AL-QAEDA terror plot to shoot down a passenger jet with a rocket launcher was foiled by police and MI5 less than six months after the 7/7 bombings, it was revealed yesterday.
A British Muslim linked to the fertiliser terror cell was behind the plot - details of which could not be reported until now due to restrictions surrounding that case.
In the wake of the 7 July bombings, he had conducted negotiations to buy rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles when he was arrested by anti-terror officers. Plans for an electricity substation - which, if bombed, could have caused blackouts across London - were also found at his home.
Kazi Rahman, 29, was jailed for nine years last year after he admitted trying to buy terrorist weapons. He was a contact of Mohammed Junaid Babar, the "supergrass" in the fertiliser trial, and called himself Haleem or Abdul Salim.
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