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'I would have had rucksack and killed hundreds'
28 Apr 2009Waheed Ali was a typical recruit for terrorist training stuck in what he called the "sparkling route between shelf stacker and taxi driver".
The Leeds suburb of Beeston is full of Muslim youths alienated from society who are easy prey for religious extremists.
Ali, 25, came to Britain aged three from Bangladesh but his parents died within a month of each other.
He and three sisters were fostered by family friends who, he said, beat him. Leaving school with almost no qualifications at 17, he met Aldgate bomber Shezhad Tanweer, "probably the best friend I'll ever have".
Ali was shown videos of Muslims fighting in Chechnya and soon met co-defendant Sadeer Saleem who started talking about Islam. He was invited to religious meetings at a bookshop in Leeds and read of the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia.
"He was meeting people for the first time in his life who cared about him," said his counsel Michael Wolkind QC. Within a week he had taken down his bedroom posters of hip hop stars and replaced them with pictures of Kalashnikov rifles.
"My life changed rapidly. I started praying three or four times a day and I saw my goal in life to help my Muslim brothers," he told the jury. He told Tanweer he wanted to fight and a day later was introduced to Mohammed Sidique Khan who organised the first trip to Pakistani training camps with money lent by one of Ali's sister. "We got our own tents, own food and our own trainer because they relied on the British for money," Ali told the court.
He and Khan were rated so highly by al Qaeda chiefs they were taken into Afghanistan but was stopped by illness from reaching the front line.
A second trip followed in 2004 and he was so committed, he told the court, he wanted to kill British soldiers. He would have been a suicide bomber had his religion permitted it, he boasted. "I would have been there on 7 July, I would have had a rucksack and would have killed hundreds of people."
