US haste blamed as bomb plot trial fails

The US was blamed for the failure of a jury in Britain to convict a group of Islamist extremists of plotting to blow up airliners.

LONDON // The United States was being blamed yesterday for the failure of a jury in Britain to convict a group of Islamist extremists of plotting to blow up at least a half-dozen airliners over the Atlantic. Although three of the eight al Qa'eda-trained men were found guilty of conspiracy to murder, none of the group was convicted of charges involving plotting to blow up planes with homemade liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks. Security sources believe that at least 2,000 passengers and crew could have been killed had the plot succeeded. The discovery of the conspiracy led to wholesale changes in boarding procedures and strict restrictions on what can be taken aboard airliners at airports across the world. But, after the jury at Woolwich Crown Court in south London failed to find any of the eight young Muslims guilty of targeting aircraft despite 56 hours of deliberation, British security chiefs were left fuming, blaming precipitous actions by their US counterparts for the failed prosecutions. The problem started in Aug 2006. The British had had the eight under surveillance for some time and had already built up an impressive body of evidence after wiretapping their bomb-making headquarters in a flat in east London. It had also been established that some of the group received bomb-making training from Abu Ubaida al Masri, an al Qa'eda commander, in Pakistan in 2005. Rashid Rauf, a militant originally from Birmingham, England, arranged the training and was considered a key player in organising Muslim extremist plots in the West. As a matter of routine, British security officials at MI5 informed the CIA two years ago that Rauf had been overheard in a phone tap talking about causing explosions in US cities. Although Tony Blair, who was prime minister in 2006, asked George W Bush to delay any actions against Rauf until a watertight case against the eight suspects in London had been compiled, Washington went ahead and put pressure on Pakistan to arrest Rauf. Pakistan complied, leaving the British authorities with no alternative but to go out immediately and arrest and charge the eight plotters in the United Kingdom. The action had to be taken so swiftly that the head of counter-terrorism, who was returning from holiday, could not even be informed beforehand. Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute - a leading research institute on international affairs in London - said the apparently precipitous action by the US illustrated the very different approaches to counter-terrorism on opposite sides of the Atlantic. "The United States say they are in a war against terror and all they want to do is smash any conspiracies," he told the BBC. "What we're concerned with is a criminal justice approach. What we want is evidence that would be admissible in court because, for us, this is an issue of criminality. "For the British, the evidence will never be better than the night before the plot is sprung. For the Americans, when you see a plot, you break it." Prosecutors in Britain are now having to decide whether or not to seek a retrial of the men, who made martyrdom videos warning the West "not to mess with Muslims". During the trial, some of the men admitted that they had planned to carry out explosions, but not on airliners. They said they had plotted to cause minor explosions outside US airline offices in London, which would pose no threat to life. They also claimed that their suicide videos were only made for publicity purposes to scare the British public after their "harmless" bombs had gone off. However, prosecution lawyers said at the trial that the bombs were ingeniously small and were intended for planes, with the ringleader of the group having already drawn up a list of possible targets on scheduled flights between Europe and the US. But the bombs were never fully constructed and members of the jury appear to have been swayed by the fact that the group had not purchased tickets or made travel plans - something which the British security forces are convinced that they would have done had not the US action in Pakistan alerted the plotters to the fact that their plans were known. Nevertheless, three of the group - Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, Assad Sarwar, 24, and Tanvir Hussain, 27 - were convicted on a charge of conspiracy to murder. The jury was unable to reach verdicts on the charge of plotting to blow up the airliners against those three, however, and were unable to reach any verdicts on the four other men. The eighth was cleared of all charges. After the arrests in 2006, huge delays built up at airports as an almost total ban on taking liquids on aircraft was introduced at airports. There were other restrictions imposed on hand luggage and more thorough searches introduced, many of which remain in place today. [e-mail]