An Iraqi teenager has admitted constructing and planting a bomb that partially exploded on a tube train at Parsons Green station in west London.
Ahmed Hassan said he assembled the device while he was bored and depressed, but claimed he had made it carefully so it would burn rather than explode.
He told the Old Bailey he had tested a small amount of his homemade explosive. “I was certain that it wouldn’t explode, that it would just burn,” he said.
“The idea of killing another human being never crossed my mind, never in my life,” he said. Nor had he intended to cause any harm or serious damage, he claimed.
Several people suffered significant burns when the 400g device partially exploded and sent a fireball through a crowded carriage in September last year.
Hassan, 18, denies attempted murder and causing an explosion.
When he made the device he was “not thinking as a normal person would”, he told the jury. “I was very bored, very depressed, very confused.”
He had begun to fantasise about becoming a fugitive after watching a number of action films, and hoped that after planting the device he could flee to France and would then be chased across Europe by Interpol.
Hassan said he had told immigration officials he had been abducted and trained by Islamic State in Iraq, but this had been “a story” he had told to secure asylum in Britain. He believed that by claiming to have been imprisoned by the group while a child, his asylum claim would be treated more sympathetically.
This had been suggested to him by fellow refugees whom he met while spending two months at the makeshift camp at Calais that was known as the Jungle, Hassan said.
“I was not taken prisoner or mistreated by Daesh,” Hassan told the London court. “I have never had any contact with IS [Isis] at all.”
Giving evidence at the start of his defence, and speaking without an interpreter, Hassan told the jury that his mother had been killed when he was an infant, and his father, a Baghdad taxi driver, had been killed when he was six.
An uncle took him to live in the relatively safe town of Jalawla, north of Baghdad, where he worked for 10 hours a day as well as attending school until the age of 15.
Despite the hard work, he was living in a relatively wealthy Kurdish area, and he did not wish to admit this when being interviewed by British immigration officials, he said.
At the Calais camp, many people made up stories about their background, and some even invented plausible tales that they sold to others. “I have never come across a refugee who said they would tell the truth when he arrived in the country,” he said.
He had arrived at the Calais camp in 2015 via Istanbul, Trieste and Paris, and after two months and several attempts, had managed to board a truck to the UK.
Earlier, the court heard that Hassan had blamed the UK and US for the deaths of his parents.
Katie Cable, a college lecturer, said Hassan had told her it was “his duty to hate Britain” because of what had happened to his family.
“I was concerned about the word ‘duty’,” said Cable, a lecturer at Brooklands College in Weybridge, Surrey.
Hassan admitted making this statement, but told the jury that it did not reflect his view of the UK, and said he did not blame the west for his parents’ deaths.
While excelling at college, Hassan texted Cable in July last year, saying: “Your country continues to bomb my people daily.”
After arriving in the UK as a 16-year-old, Hassan was looked after by the children’s charity Barnardo’s before being placed with foster parents in Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey.
After disappearing to Wales without telling his foster parents in the summer of 2016, he was referred by Cable to the Prevent deradicalisation programme, the jury was told.
The following summer, instead of going on holiday to Blackpool with his foster parents, he stayed alone at their home, where he repeatedly scrawled the word “bored” on the inside of his bedroom door.
He then built the 400g bomb using ingredients acquired on Amazon and at local supermarkets, and instructions acquired on the internet, the court was told.
Cross-examined by Alison Morgan, prosecuting, Hassan denied that he felt guilty at accepting a safe haven and an education in the country that he blamed for his father’s death.
Hassan told Tim Maloney QC, defending, that he now believed that what he had done had been wrong. “I wish I could travel back in time and stop it at once, but that’s not possible. I’m sorry but it can’t be done.”
The trial continues.
