‘Lone wolf terrorist’ talked out of bombing Leeds hospital by patient – Trial

The trial of Mohammed Farooq started just before Christmas last year but was halted and the jury discharged. A new trial began this week at Crown Court Sheffield

From Leeds Live and the BBC

An alleged “self-radicalised, lone wolf terrorist” was stopped from detonating a bomb outside a Leeds hospital by a patient who managed to “talk him down,” a court has heard.

Mohammad Farooq, 28, had planned to “kill as many nurses as possible” when he was arrested with a pressure cooker bomb outside the Gledhow Wing of St James’s Hospital in Leeds, in the early hours of January 20.

The prosecution in the trial at Sheffield Crown Court says Farooq planned to “seek his own martyrdom” through a “murderous terrorist attack” by detonating the bomb, then killing as many people as possible with knives before using an imitation firearm to incite police to shoot him dead.

Opening the trial on Monday, Jonathan Sandiford KC said Farooq had immersed himself in an “extremist Islamic ideology” and that his “plan A” had been to attack RAF Menwith Hill – a base in North Yorkshire used by the United States.

“When he thought that was not possible, his ‘plan B’ was to attack St James Hospital, a softer and less well-protected target than a military base,”

He denies preparing acts of terrorism, but has pleaded guilty to firearms offences and possessing an explosive substance with intent. Mr Farooq also pleaded guilty to having a document likely to be useful to a person preparing or committing an act of terrorism.

On Tuesday Det Con Maisie Stevens told jurors at Sheffield Crown Court Mr Farooq’s downloads included a 157-page document called The Anarchist’s Cookbook. The guide contained instructions on how to make “a variety of explosives and different booby traps”, she said. One passage read: “This chapter is going to kill and maim more people than all the other pages put together.”

Mr Farooq also downloaded another guide, entitled Safety and Security Guidelines for Lone Wolf Mujahideen and Small Cells, she told the court. A screenshot of a video on how to make black powder was also discovered on his phone, as well as searches for ingredients needed for the explosive substance and a pressure cooker . . . “Viable” recipes for nerve agents which experts said could cause multiple fatalities were discovered on his mobile phone,

The court was told he had also downloaded numerous propaganda videos from social media, including one entitled ‘How the West turns Children against Muslims’.

Another video referenced Jewish people “controlling the world”,

 …he allegedly wrote a note on his phone which read “It’s better to die than to live a life of humiliation. There’s much suffering in the Muslim world […] maybe it’s time we stand up, maybe it’s time we fight back.”

An investigation found Farooq had become self-radicalised by accessing extremist material and propaganda online.

“That consisted mainly of material published by Islamic State, al Qaida, videos on TikTok and lectures by Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American radical preacher,” Mr Sandiford said.

Farooq was a clinical support worker at the hospital and his “secondary motive” for choosing it as a target was that he had a grievance against several of his former colleagues

Mr Sandiford said “two pieces of good fortune intervened” to stop the attack that day. The first was that a bomb threat he sent in a text to an off-duty nurse in order to lure people to the car park where he was waiting with the bomb was not seen for almost an hour, and the full-scale evacuation he had hoped for did not happen.

Farooq left but returned shortly afterwards with a new plan to wait in a hospital café for a staff shift change and detonate his device, “killing as many nurses as possible.”

But Mr Sandiford told the court that “luck intervened again” because a patient, Nathan Newby, was standing outside the hospital having a cigarette and “noticed the defendant.”

He said: “Mr Newby realised something was amiss and began to talk to him instead of walking away. That simple act of kindness almost certainly saved many lives that night because, as the defendant was later to tell the police officers who arrested him, Mr Newby succeeded in ‘talking him down’.”

“Mr Newby stayed with the defendant, keeping him engaged and calm. Mr Newby also persuaded the defendant to move away from the main entrance to a seating area so that the IED was as far away from the building as it was possible to go.”

Mr Newby is due to give evidence at a later date.

The trial continues.