The fact that he is a “young married father” is the most important thing about him, of course, and elucidates why he undertook this plot. What’s that? Jihad violence in the name of Islam? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?
“Terror mastermind Abdulla Ahmed Ali guilty of bombing plot,” by Nico Hines for the Times, September 8 :
A young married father was found guilty today of conspiring to kill hundreds of members of the public in a terrorist bombing campaign.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali planned to detonate homemade liquid bombs in attacks on British targets, including at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 3.
Two other men were found guilty of conspiracy to murder. One of the defendants was found not guilty and the jury was unable to reach a verdict for four other men on trial.
But embarrassingly for counter-terrorism police, the jury rejected the main charge made against the men that there was a plot to cause a series of explosions on airliners to rival the 9/11 attacks.
Police claimed that the men were planning to use an unusual hydrogen peroxide liquid bomb disguised in soft drink bottles. The case led to the security procedures which have prevented thousands of holidaymakers carrying containers of liquid onto aircraft since 2006.
Ali, 27, was the leader of an east London al-Qaeda-inspired terror cell, a jury at Woolwich Crown Court found. He and his co-defendants, Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27, admitted plotting a series of small-scale headline-grabbing bomb attacks. But the jury rejected Ali’s claims he did not plan to kill or hurt anyone in the blasts. It also failed to reach verdicts on Ibrahim Savant, Arafat Waheed Khan, Waheed Zaman and Umar Islam. An eighth man, Mohammed Gulzar, was found not guilty on all counts.
The jury of eight men and four women had been deliberating for more than 50 hours at the end of a trial which began in April.
Police said the plot was drawn up in Pakistan with detailed instructions passed to Ali during frequent trips to its lawless border region with Afghanistan….