Morning:
9°c
Seven face retrial over 'jets plot'
Martin Bentham, Home Affairs Editor9 Sep 2008
Prosecutors are to seek a full retrial of seven men accused of conspiring to blow up transatlantic airliners flying from Heathrow.
The decision comes after the failure by a jury to convict them over the key charge that they plotted to detonate liquid hydrogen peroxide bombs smuggled on board jets in Oasis and Lucozade bottles.
Six of the men recorded "martyr videos" which the prosecution said would have been released after the planes were blown up in mid-air. But the men, British Muslims from Walthamstow and High Wycombe, claimed they were simply designed to cause panic and publicise their extremist views.
Three men, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27, were convicted yesterday on a second, more general, charge of conspiracy to murder. They could be put back in the dock to answer the more serious allegation that they conspired to detonate explosives on aircraft.
Another four defendants - Ibrahim Savant, 27, Arafat Waheed Khan, 27, Waheed Zaman, 24, and Umar Islam, 24 - could also be retried both for conspiracy to murder and for conspiring to detonate explosives after the jury failed to reach verdicts.
All seven defendants earlier admitted conspiring to cause a public nuisance by distributing al Qaeda-style videos threatening suicide attacks in Britain.
The jury's deadlock on the key charge concerning the jets, and the acquittal on all counts of an eighth defendant - 27-year-old Mohammed Gulzar - has led to calls by airline chiefs for a relaxation of the baggage restrictions put in place after the men's arrests in August 2006. These demands have already been rejected by ministers, and sources said today that the Crown Prosecution Service would press for a full retrial.
Although defence lawyers are likely to try to block any retrial, particularly in the case of the three men already convicted, legal sources said that prosecutors remained determined to press for it.
"This is widely regarded as a very strong case and there is an absolute determination to continue with it," said one source. "This was a major effort by the police and the security services and there is a lot of very strong evidence and a retrial will be sought.
Jurors sometimes do fail to reach a verdict, but hiccups like this do not mean that the evidence should not be put before another jury."
The CPS decision will ease pressure on ministers to relax further the tight airport security introduced in the wake of the alleged jets plot which counterterrorist officers believe would have claimed thousands of lives. BAA, the owner of London's three main airports including Heathrow, and the British Air Transport Association, have already called for the curbs to be reduced after the end of the trial at Woolwich crown court yesterday.
The Department of Transport immediately ruled out any such changes but the prospect of a new trial and future possible convictions that could prove the airline plot allegation means that the restrictions - including a ban on taking large amounts of liquid through security checks - are even less likely to be substantially altered in the near future.
Yesterday's deadlock came after a four-month, £10million trial. The jurors concluded that the plot mastermind Ali, along with Sarwar and Hussain, intended to murder people with liquid bombs.
Prosecutors said Ali's gang considered targets including gas terminals, oil refineries and Canary Wharf, but jurors failed to agree over the key allegation that the conspiracy was ultimately aimed at blowing up jets.
