3 Convicted In Bomb Plot That Targeted Transatlantic Flights To Canada, U.S.

A British jury found three men guilty Monday of conspiracy to murder in a terrorist bombing campaign, but could not find enough evidence to convict them of a plot to blow up transatlantic airliners.

Prosecutors said they would seek a retrial of the three men, plus four others on whom the jury was unable to reach verdicts over the same charges.

A jury found Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain guilty of conspiracy to murder by trying to make a bomb out of hydrogen peroxide.

The jury failed to reach verdicts on charges against four other defendants: Ibrahim Savant, Arafat Waheed Khan, Waheed Zaman and Umar Islam.

An eighth man, Mohammed Gulzar, was found not guilty.

The jury also was unable to reach a verdict on prosecutors’ claims that Ali intended to target passenger jets flying from London to major North American cities with suicide attacks.

Prosecutor Peter Wright said during the trial that the men planned to attack Air Canada flights to Montreal and Toronto, as well as flights by United Airlines and American Airlines to several U.S. cities, at the height of the 2006 summer vacation season.

The men’s plans were stopped by British and U.S. intelligence officers in a marathon investigation that led to a bomb factory in eastern London, to British woodlands where chemicals had been dumped and to Japan, Mauritius, South Africa and Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas where conversations were intercepted.

Police swooped down and arrested two dozen suspects in dawn raids across Britain on Aug. 10, 2006, a date that would go down in history as the day when air travel changed dramatically.

Airports in the United States and Europe ground to a halt with hundreds of flights cancelled over security concerns. Planes were stuck on runways for hours. Tempers flared as passengers lined up to surrender carry-on items under new security precautions that restricted the quantity of liquids in their luggage.

A lawyer for Ali, the alleged ringleader of the group, insisted last month he was guilty only of planning a childish stunt to make a political point.

Ali acknowledged planning to release anti-western videos and detonate explosives at a high-profile location as part of a campaign to change the British government’s policy toward the Muslim world.

“It was childish, it was stupid, but it is not murder,” the lawyer, Nadine Radford, said during a July hearing.

Ali, Sarwar and Hussain had already pleaded guilty to conspiring to cause explosions. All eight denied conspiracy to murder.

Ali told the court they planned to set off a small bomb at a site such as Britain’s Houses of Parliament or Heathrow Airport to advertise a propaganda documentary protesting the West’s actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. He denied intending to kill anyone.

Ali, Sarwar, Hussain and two others also have acknowledged conspiring to cause a public nuisance by distributing a-Qaida-style videos threatening suicide bomb attacks in Britain. The three remaining defendants deny all charges.

Prosecutors say the airline cell was likely inspired by both the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the July 2005 London transit bombings, although they do not allege the men had direct links to al-Qaida.

Wright told the court that police found a computer memory stick in Ali’s pocket with details of flights from London’s Heathrow Airport to Chicago, New York, Boston, Denver, Miami and Montreal.

Prosecutors also say the men had stockpiled enough hydrogen peroxide to create 20 liquid bombs, although they did not create any viable explosives, and no date had been chosen for the attacks.

Judge David Calvert-Smith said sentencing would be at a later date.

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