A British court on Thursday jailed nine Islamists inspired by slain Al-Qaeda lynchpin Anwar al-Awlaqi for planning terror attacks on targets including the London Stock Exchange.
The nine men, who are all British nationals of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin, had pleaded guilty to a variety of terror-related offences at a hearing a week ago at Woolwich Crown Court in southeast London.
Judge Alan Wilkie sentenced three of the men to “imprisonment for public protection” — an indeterminate jail term for suspects regarded as dangerous — while the other sentences ranged from 16 years to five years.
Wilkie said they were “fundamentalist Islamists who have turned to violent terrorism in direct response to material, both propagandist and instructive, issued on the Internet by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
Awlaqi, the US-born leader of AQAP, was killed on September 30 in an air strike in Yemen.
Wilkie added that it was a “difficult and complex sentencing” that “gives rise to a number of issues of principle and has a high profile”.
Prosecutors said the men belonged to a group of fundamentalists who planned a spate of mail bomb attacks during the run-up to Christmas 2010 and discussed launching a “Mumbai-style” atrocity.
Four of the men — Mohammed Chowdhury, 21, and Shah Rahman, 28, from London and brothers Gurukanth Desai, 30, and Abdul Miah 25, from Cardiff — admitted preparing for acts of terrorism by planning to plant an improvised explosive device (IED) in the toilets of the London Stock Exchange.
Miah was jailed for 16 years and 10 months, Chowdhury for 13 years eight months, Rahman and Desai for 12 years each.
Three others, Mohammed Shahjahan, 27, Usman Khan, 20, and Nazam Hussain, 26, all from Stoke in central England, received indeterminate sentences with a minimum of eight years for making longer-term plans which included taking part in “terrorist training” in Pakistan.
Another man, Omar Latif, 28, from Cardiff, admitted preparing for acts of terrorism but was not involved in the specific plots and was jailed for 10 years four months.
Mohibur Rahman, 27, from Stoke, admitted possessing a copy of Inspire, an Internet magazine produced by AQAP, and was jailed for five years.
There is a need to form an international treaty on the control of IEDs. It might be difficult to control the sale and purchase of materials that are used in IEDs, but something can be done. In addition to sentencing the extremist elements, there should be some kind of rehabilitation program that focuses on their rehabilitation.
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