A jury Monday convicted three young Britons of conspiracy to commit murder but acquitted the accused ringleader in an alleged Al Qaeda plot to blow up passenger jets bound for North America.
Jurors also failed to reach verdicts for four others, as well as for a central allegation that led to worldwide restrictions on liquids in carry-on luggage — that the suspects planned to explode hydrogen peroxide-based bombs on seven trans-Atlantic flights, an alleged attempt to match the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001.
In a statement Monday evening, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith welcomed the guilty verdicts for Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27; Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27, all Britons of Pakistani descent. She said authorities “saved countless lives” by disrupting the group, which was exposed by surveillance conducted by British, U.S. and Pakistani investigators.
Nonetheless, officials expressed disappointment that the jury was not convinced by evidence that included clandestine intercepts of suspects in a safe house filming “martyrdom” videos, working with explosive components and discussing ways to bypass airport security.
The jurors found that Ali, Sarwar and Hussain conspired to bomb unknown targets, apparently based on evidence that the group scouted refineries and other sites around London in addition to the flights bound for the United States and Canada.
The four who were not convicted Monday remain in jail because they pleaded guilty to lesser charges of conspiring to cause a public nuisance. Prosecutors said they would have to decide whether to retry all seven on the allegation of targeting planes.
The jury, which deliberated 56 hours over about a month, issued an outright acquittal of Mohammed Gulzar, 27. Prosecutors accused him of being a senior operative who arrived from Pakistan via South Africa to lead the attack in the final stages.
The defendants denied any violent intent despite their seven videos, which resembled the farewell messages filmed by suicide bombers who killed 52 people on the transport system here in 2005. During a five-month trial, the defendants testified that they only planned to set off harmless devices at the airport as part of a publicity stunt to protest mistreatment of Muslims. Gulzar was the only defendant who did not make a suicide video.
The case also suffered because government scientists had difficulty causing the hydrogen peroxide mixture to ignite, raising questions about the effectiveness of the explosive, officials said.
Within months of the arrests in August 2006, Western anti-terror officials had put together a detailed portrait of the plot. Anti-terror officials say half a dozen defendants traveled to Al Qaeda compounds in Pakistan in 2005 and 2006 and were trained by explosives experts led by Abu Ubaidah al-Masri, the network’s operations chief at the time and alleged mastermind of the London bombings.