From The Telegraph
A married couple plotted an Isil suicide bombing of the London Underground or Westfield shopping centre around the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 suicide attacks, a court heard on Tuesday.
Mohammed Rehman, 25, and his wife Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, had enough bomb material to “cause multiple fatalities” and were just days away from being able to carry out an attack. They had already tested explosives in a back garden and only need to make a detonator, when counter-terrorism police swooped. But they were caught after police spotted Rehman’s Twitter account, where he went under the name “Silent Bomber” and had asked followers for advice on which target to hit, the Old Bailey heard.
Opening the prosecution, Tony Badenoch QC said the pair had a “common interest” in violent and extreme Islamic ideology and had repeatedly researched 7/7 bombers, who killed 52 people in London in 2005. They also developed a keen interest in Isil and Rehman’s online research showed he approved of their atrocities and “wished to play his own part”, jurors were told.
The prosecutor said: “The evidence suggests that the London Underground may well have been on his mind as a potential target as he was particularly fixated with the events of 7/7 and he referred to Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 suicide bombers, as his ‘beloved predecessor’.”
Mr Badenoch said the 10kg of Urea Nitrate found on their arrest ‘would have caused multiple fatalities in a public place.’ Rehman had enough experience to make a detonator in no more than a couple of days, it is claimed.
In (another tweet) he wrote: “I have other plans if Insha’Allah goes to plan & I’m preparing for an Istishaadi [martyrdom] operation.”
This was followed by: “Now I just make explosives in preparations for kuffar lol & when I’ve made the required amount I’ll be wearing them on my chest.”
Mr Badenoch added: “They were not attention-seeking boasts as the plethora of chemicals seized at the home of Mohammed Rehman demonstrate. Those chemicals were capable of being mixed into lethal bombs – ready to go, following one of the many recipes collated in his notebook and stored on his computer.”
The prosecutor said there was also evidence Rehman went to lengths to ensure his would not be a failed attempt as seen on July 21, 2005, when the detonators failed to work. Eight days before his arrest he tweeted: “It’s always good practice to use more than one detonator in a device to ensure a successful detonation.”
The couple married on 31 October 2013 at Reading Islamic Centre but lived separately, jurors heard. (are they actually married in the English law which is the only one that matters?
Rehman and Khan, both of Reading, are charged with preparing terrorist acts on or before May 28 this year. Rehman is also charged with possessing an article for terrorist purposes.
They deny the charges.
The trial continues.
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One Response
“Ye shall be judged by every idle word…”.
However, amusing as it is to think of a jihadi plotter who gets caught because – like most everyone else on Social Media – he is tempted to ‘let it all hang out’ and shoot his mouth off, I really do wish there could be some kind of ban on making this sort of information – “How We Gottum” – public.
We are engaged in a war. A war to the death, with the stakes nothing lower than the survival or annihilation of our (and all) civilisation.
I don’t need to know how homeland security and the cops noticed and tracked down this evil plotter, this Fifth Columnist. The only people who need to know are the judge, and the jury in the courtroom, and I would have sworn them to silence and let it be known that the *exact* details of how this enemy plot was detected and foiled, do NOT need to be made known.
But since that hasn’t been done, I would assume that the next lot of jihad plotters will be more cautious about their use of Twitter.