Four failed suicide bombers were found guilty today of an extremist Muslim plot to attack the London transport system exactly two weeks after the 7/7 bombings.
After a six-month trial, Muktar Said Ibrahim, Yassin Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Hussain Osman were unanimously convicted of conspiracy to murder at London’s Woolwich Crown Court. They had claimed the bombs were fake and just a demonstration against the war in Iraq.
The jury of nine women and three men will resume their deliberations tomorrow on charges against two other defendants in the trial - Kwaku Asiedu and Adel Yahya - after being told by the judge, Mr Justice Fulford, QC, that he would accept majority 10-2 verdicts.
Ibrahim, Omar, Mohammed and Osman attempted to detonate hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour bombs covered in shrapnel on three Tube trains and a bus on July 21, 2005, two weeks after 52 innocent people were killed in Britain’s first suicide terror attacks.
Their murderous plan only failed at the last moment because of problems with the home-made explosives, hot weather, or mere “good fortune”, the court heard.
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The jury reached its partial decision on the seventh day of deliberations. As the guilty verdicts were read out, Ibrahim, 29, of Stoke Newington, north London, closed his eyes and looked down at his hands. Omar, 26, of New Southgate, north London, and Mohammed, 25, of North Kensington, west London, both stared at the judge.
Mr Justice Fulford said they would not need to re-appear in court until sentencing. As he was led out of the dock, Mohammed grinned to himself.
Although the men planned to attack the capital just a fortnight after the “carnage” of July 7, it was not some “hastily arranged copycat”, the prosecution alleged.
In fact, the plot began nearly a year before. In December 2004, Ibrahim - the cell’s “emir” or leader - travelled to Pakistan to learn the necessary skills to carry out a terrifying atrocity in the UK, just three months after being granted a British passport.
He was there at exactly the same time as the July 7 ring leader Mohammed Siddique Khan and his fellow suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer.
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Preparations for the July 21 plot began in earnest in April 2005. Omar’s one-bedroom flat in New Southgate became the “bomb factory”. In the early hours of that day, Ibrahim, Omar and Mohammed met at Mohammed’s flat and they set off from there with the rucksack bombs.
Mohammed, wearing a distinctive top with ’New York’ on it, boarded a Northern line train on the London Underground just after 12.30pm. He turned his bomb towards a mother and her nine-month-old son before detonating it at Oval tube station.
When he was challenged by an off-duty firefighter, he claimed the gelatinous goo emanating from his rucksack was bread.
Less than ten minutes later, as the northbound Victoria line train Omar was on pulled into Warren Street station, he detonated his device. Afterwards he stopped two Muslim women in the street and asked for their help. When one refused to take him home, he asked: “What type of Muslim are you?”
Just after 1pm, Ibrahim tried to blow himself up on a No 26 bus. He walked to the back of the top deck - just like one of the 7/7 bombers - and detonated his device as the vehicle neared the junction of Shoreditch High Street and Hackney Road.
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Osman, an Ethiopian, was accused of trying to blow up a bomb on a Hammersmith and City Line train at Shepherd’s Bush.
After their plan failed, all four men went into hiding or fled. Omar escaped to Birmingham dressed as a woman in a burka. He was arrested in a dawn raid on July 27 during which armed police nearly gunned him down when they found him standing in a bath, fully clothed, with a rucksack on his back.
Two days later, Ibrahim and Mohammed were drawn out of the latter’s Delgarno Gardens flat wearing only their underpants after officers threw CS gas canisters inside. They had armed themselves with homemade kitchen knife and mop handle spears to attack police, but never used them. Osman fled to Italy on a Eurostar train. He was arrested in Rome on July 29.