British Terror Trial Traces a Path to Militant Islam

Author: Elaine Sciolino and Stephen Grey

Publication: The New York Times
Date: November 26, 2006
More than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer suitable for making bombs was
locked in a rented storage warehouse. A cookie tin of aluminum powder was hidden
behind a garden shed. Young British Muslims underwent military training at
guerrilla camps in remote parts of Pakistan. Suspects, surreptitiously taped by
the police, talked about bombing targets in Britain.
At the storage site, the police found more than half a ton of ammonium nitrate
fertilizer which could fuel a blast.
Enter a computer technician in Canada experimenting with remote-controlled
detonation devices and a collaborator-turned-informer from Queens testifying about
secret meetings with operatives of Al Qaeda.
For eight months, the tale of the Operation Crevice Seven has been unfolding in a
cramped, windowless courtroom in the Old Bailey in London.
On trial are seven men, ages 19 to 34, six of them with family roots in Pakistan.
Arrested in 2004, they are charged with involvement in a criminal conspiracy to
make explosives to commit murder, allegations that they all deny. Their target,
the authorities say, was unclear - a nightclub, perhaps, or a shopping mall,
public utilities, a British airliner or even the House of Commons.
But investigators say the evidence reveals the workings of the kind of cell most
feared by officials in Europe. Young Muslims, radicalized by local imams and
trained at military camps in Pakistan with vague connections to Al Qaeda, plan an
attack at home with help from outside terrorists.
The July 7, 2005, London transit bombings and the alleged London-based plot
uncovered last August to blow up airliners also involved disaffected British
youths of Pakistani descent, some of whom had traveled to Pakistan for family
visits, study and perhaps training.
In a speech this month, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director general of the
British security service known as MI5, disclosed that intelligence officers were
watching 1,600 people "who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating,
terrorist acts here and overseas."
She said they had identified nearly 30 plots that "often have links back to Al
Qaeda in Pakistan and through those links Al Qaeda gives guidance and training to
its largely British foot soldiers here." She said other countries - Spain, France,
Canada and Germany - faced similar threats.
Dame Eliza's comments echo concerns among intelligence officials throughout Europe
that remnants of Al Qaeda's network, disrupted after Sept. 11, were reconstituting
in the tribal areas on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Crevice defendants deny they were a conspiratorial cell. Some admit to
training in Pakistan but insist they had a goal other than attacking Britain,
notwithstanding the fertilizer stored near London. They said they supported jihad
in Afghanistan and the liberation of Kashmir, a disputed area between Pakistan and
India.
One defendant, Salahuddin Amin, a 31-year-old part-time taxi driver from Luton,
testified Tuesday that he started donating money to help Kashmir in 1999. Then he
moved to Pakistan in 2001 and became a conduit directing assistance from Britain
to Afghan refugees in Pakistan, he said.
But prosecutors charge that Mr. Amin, who knew some of the other Crevice
defendants from Britain, became a link between them and militants in Pakistan.
They said he and others attended a two-day course in Pakistan to learn to make
fertilizer-based explosives. In videotaped confessions to the British police after
his arrest in 2005, he admitted being "mixed up with terrorists" and said he
provided a formula for explosives to one of his co-defendants through an Internet
chat room.
On the witness stand, Mr. Amin proclaimed his innocence, saying he confessed only
after being jailed for 10 months in Pakistan, where he said he was beaten and
threatened with a whirring electric drill. "I would never take part in plots like
that," he testified.
Heeding the Call to Jihad
Omar Khyam, 24, considered by prosecutors to be the ringleader of the group, began
his journey to extremism as a teenager in Crawley, just south of London.
Mr. Khyam, a standout cricket player, planned to study electrical engineering in
college, but when he was 16 he began spending time with members of Al Muhajiroun,
a radical group active in Crawley and dedicated to a global Islamic community
under Shariah, the legal code based on the Koran. The group, led by Omar Bakri
Mohammed, is now banned in Britain.
Two years later, instead of preparing for his high school exams, Mr. Khyam ran
away, leaving a note saying he was off to join Islamic freedom fighters in
Kashmir.
His uncle told a British newspaper that ran an article in 2000 about Mr. Khyam's
sudden departure that his nephew had been indoctrinated by Al Muhajiroun. Mr.
Khyam's family persuaded him to return home, but not before he had attended a
training camp.
A search at a defendant's home turned up a cookie tin of aluminum powder, another
possible bomb ingredient.
"They taught me everything I needed for guerrilla warfare in Kashmir, AK47s,
pistols, RPGs, sniper rifles, climbing and crawling techniques, reconnaissance and
light machine guns," Mr. Khyam testified in the Crevice trial in September.
After enrolling in college in Britain, Mr. Khyam returned to Pakistan in 2001 for
a friend's wedding and crossed into Afghanistan to meet members of the Taliban
movement before it was overthrown after 9/11. "They were soft, kind and humble,
but harsh with their enemies," he recalled in court.
Meanwhile, in Luton, a town on the other side of London and another center of Al
Muhajiroun recruitment, Mr. Amin also heeded the call to jihad.
His videotaped confessions to the police tell the story of his rejection of his
Western way of life, his turn to prayer and the rules of Islam and his political
radicalization.
It was in a Luton prayer center that he first met some of the men accused of being
Crevice conspirators, including Mr. Khyam and a man accused of being a Qaeda
operative, Abu Munthir, who was visiting from Pakistan.
Videos showing the slaughter of Muslims in Chechnya and Bosnia jolted Mr. Amin
into sending money to "freedom fighters" in Kashmir to buy arms and ammunition.
The lectures of the radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri at the Finsbury Park
mosque in London shortly before 9/11 and the American-led invasion of Afghanistan
helped persuade him that he should join the Afghan fight.
Two months after 9/11, Mr. Amin sold his house in Luton and went to Pakistan in
search of training with militants, according to his confessions. The prosecution
argues that over the next three years, Mr. Amin, Mr. Khyam and their associates
entered a hidden world of terrorism with tentacles on three continents.
Secrecy was maintained by using aliases and coded language. Cellphone
conversations were avoided. Rather than using e-mail messages, communications were
passed through Internet chats or by electronic messages stored for others to pick
up later with passwords. Computer hard drives and cellphone SIM cards were
discarded and replaced often.
The prosecution's guide through that world was a Pakistani-American named Mohammed
Junaid Babar, who said he worked for the New York chapter of Al Muhajiroun.
Defense lawyers portray Mr. Babar as a fabricator and possibly an agent for the
United States government. "You are a liar, a deceitful, self-centered, arrogant
fantasist," Michel Massih, a lawyer for one of the defendants, told Mr. Babar
during cross-examination last April.
Mr. Babar acknowledged having lied when first questioned by the F.B.I. He pleaded
guilty in New York in June 2004 to providing material support for terrorists, and
he said in court that he was testifying against the Crevice suspects to reduce his
sentence.
Yet during 17 days on the witness stand, Mr. Babar, the star witness for the
prosecution, told a riveting story.
A militant networker, Mr. Babar said he moved to Pakistan in November 2001 with
money and instructions from Al Muhajiroun. A year later, on a fund-raising trip to
London, Mr. Babar said, he first met members of what he called the "Crawley lot,"
including Mr. Khyam and Anthony Garcia, an Algerian-born aspiring fashion model
who had changed his name and is now accused of purchasing the secreted fertilizer.
Mr. Babar said Mr. Khyam told him that he and other "brothers" from Crawley were
not just a local operation but reported to a man called Abdul Hadi, described by
Mr. Khyam as the "No. 3" in Al Qaeda.
In mid-2003, the prosecution said, the Crevice suspects began coming together in
Pakistan where Mr. Babar's home in Lahore was a haven for young, radical Britons
of Pakistani descent.
Bomb-related equipment like detonators, fertilizer and aluminum powder that can be
used to fuel an explosion, and beans to make the poison ricin were stored in a
bedroom cupboard, he said. The backyard was used for small-scale experiments with
explosives, including the detonation of a spice jar packed with chemicals.
Mr. Amin, meanwhile, was living close by. He said in his police confessions that
he had been collecting money and materials for fighters in Afghanistan and passing
them on to the man accused of being a Qaeda operative, Abu Munthir, who had once
visited the Luton prayer center.
When Mr. Khyam arrived in Pakistan in 2003, hoping to train to fight in
Afghanistan, he was told there were enough fighters there, according to Mr. Amin's
confessions. Instead, Abu Munthir sent word that if he was really serious, he
should "do something" in Britain, Mr. Amin told the police.
Later that year, Mr. Khyam, Mr. Amin and another man traveled to a safe house in
Kohat, Pakistan, for two days of training in making explosives, including
fertilizer bombs, Mr. Amin said. Mr. Khyam then organized a session in the
mountains around Malakand near the Afghan border, allegedly to teach others what
he had learned.
Mr. Khyam and a core group of three other Crevice suspects, including Mr. Babar,
made their way there by posing as Western tourists looking to visit lakes and
glaciers.
Mr. Babar said one of the men he brought along was a Canadian named Mohammed Momin
Khawaja, a computer engineer, now 27, who is accused of being the detonator-maker
in the plot.
Mr. Babar recalled in court that the first test with fertilizer-based explosives
failed; the second was moderately successful.
"It created a U in the ground," Mr. Babar testified. "It went down, sideways and
back up the other way." The group videotaped the scene, he added, hoping to
produce a "a minimovie-type thing" with Koranic verses or songs, to inspire
others.
If Mr. Babar is to be believed, Mr. Khyam became so determined to carry out an
attack in Britain that during this time he also took a 10-day trip to seek more
guidance from Qaeda operatives.
Mr. Babar said Mr. Khyam told him that the instructions from Abu Munthir were for
"multiple bombings," either "simultaneously or one after the other on the same
day."
Mr. Babar recalled Mr. Khyam saying that Britain was as responsible as the United
States for what was happening in the Middle East and should be attacked. "He said
we need to hit certain spots like pubs, nightclubs and trains," Mr. Babar said.
An Undercover Investigation
Precisely how and when the authorities learned of the group's activities is
unclear, but by early February 2004, they had begun one of Britain's largest
antiterrorist undercover investigations. Operation Crevice, aided by the United
States, Canada and Pakistan, involved round-the-clock human surveillance, audio
wiretaps in cars and homes and video surveillance.
On Feb. 20, investigators got an extraordinarily lucky break: a suspicious
employee at a self-storage warehouse outside of London called the police to report
that someone named Nabeel Hussain was storing a large amount of fertilizer.
The police inserted an undercover officer called Amanda as the receptionist and
secretly replaced the fertilizer with a benign substance. A hidden camera was
installed and filmed Mr. Khyam when he showed up to check the contents.
The police continued to watch and listen, and their 3,500 hours of surveillance
tapes are at the core of the prosecution case. Some of the most chilling
conversations played in court are between Mr. Khyam, whose Suzuki sport utility
vehicle and apartment had been bugged, and Jawad Akbar, 23, a college student
whose apartment had been bugged.
In a conversation recorded in February 2004, Mr. Akbar talked of an "easy" target,
like a nightclub, "where you don't need no experience and nothing and you could
get a job." In such a place, he said, "no one can even turn round and say, 'Oh,
they were innocent,' those slags dancing around," using a slang term for loose
women.
When Mr. Khyam asked what he would do if he got a job at a place like the Ministry
of Sound, London's largest nightclub, Mr. Akbar replied, "Blow the whole thing
up."
In March, Mr. Khyam talked about a simultaneous attack of Britain's gas,
electricity and water systems.
"The electrics go off so it's a blackout, and then the gas lot move in and bang,"
he said. "Then something goes wrong with the water, a simultaneous attack."
In late March, when Mr. Khyam and his younger brother, Shujah Mahmood, 19, also a
defendant, bought tickets to fly to Pakistan on April 6, the police feared that an
attack in Britain was imminent.
On March 30, 700 police officers raided two dozen locations, shutting down what
they suspected was a cell and arresting six of the defendants.
They found the cookie tin containing aluminum powder behind a shed at Mr. Khyam's
family home in Crawley. They also found a dozen CD-ROMs giving detailed plans of
Britain's electricity and gas systems that they charged had been stolen from the
National Grid Transco utility company by an employee, Waheed Mahmood. At 34, Mr.
Mahmood, a father of four, is the oldest Crevice defendant.
The police seized a list of British synagogues and computer video files containing
parts of an explosives handbook and a military training manual. Investigators also
found instructions for how to react if contacted by counterterrorism authorities.
Meanwhile, Mr. Khawaja, who had recently returned from visiting Crevice suspects
in Britain, was arrested in Canada. Electrical equipment, described by British
authorities as remote-control devices that could be connected to bomb detonators,
as well as guns and ammunition, were found at his home. He is awaiting trial in
Canada, the first suspect to be tried under Canada's 2001 Antiterrorism Act.
The Prosecution's Case
Prosecutors acknowledge that they have not been able to identify either a fixed
target or a date for an attack, but they do not have to. To win convictions, they
only have to prove that the seven defendants conspired to cause an explosion
"likely to endanger life" in Britain.
Mr. Khyam, Mr. Garcia and Mr. Hussain are also charged with possessing 600
kilograms, or about 1,320 pounds, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and Mr. Khyam
and Mr. Mahmood with possessing aluminum powder, in both cases with the intent to
use the ingredients to commit an act of terrorism.
In considering the surveillance tapes, defense lawyers argue that their clients
may have been doing a lot of talking about deadly chaos, but that it was nothing
more than talk. Some of the schemes seemed like fantasy, like injecting poison
into beer cans at soccer games. Others were more frightening, if true: Mr. Amin is
accused of making inquiries about buying a radioactive "dirty bomb" from the
Russian mafia in Belgium.
As in other criminal cases in Britain, some of the evidence against the suspects
is not permitted to be disclosed - either to the jury or the public - until the
trials are over for fear that juries will be improperly swayed. Even the news
media is under a strict order by the judge to avoid revealing certain information
about the case.
The evidence presented shows that the radicalization of the defendants began years
ago, raising questions about how well the British security services monitored
militants in their midst before last year's transit bombings. The authorities
continue to investigate any links between the Crevice defendants and the 2005
bombers, one of whom, the government says, had visited a training camp in Pakistan
before the attack.
Investigators closely watch traffic between Britain and Pakistan. But that is a
significant challenge with nearly 400,000 visits by residents of Britain to
Pakistan in 2004, of an average length of 41 days. And it is even more difficult
to determine which, if any, of those visitors are militants following the
dangerous route of traveling to Pakistan for indoctrination and training.
"Counterterrorism efforts haven't been able to penetrate the process of
radicalization and recruitment," said Sajjan M. Gohel, director for international
security at the London-based Asia-Pacific Foundation. "For every individual
captured or killed, there are at least five more coming down the assembly line."