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| Britain |
| Badat gets 13 years |
| 2005-04-23 |
| A BRITISH shoe-bomber was jailed for 13 years yesterday after an Old Bailey judge gave him credit for abandoning a plot to attack a transatlantic flight. Saajid Badat, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to become a "courier of death", could have faced up to 50 years in prison if he had not withdrawn from the scheme with the shoe-bomber Richard Reid to carry out co-ordinated attacks on US aircraft. Badat, 25, once told his parents: "I have a sincere desire to sell my soul to Allah in return for paradise." But days before he was due to fly he backed out of the al-Qaeda plot, took the device apart and hid the detonator in a suitcase under his bed. The explosive was in a rolled-up sock. For nearly two years Badat kept his life in Afghanistan training camps and the plot a secret until police searched his Gloucester home as part of an international operation. Yesterday Mr Justice Fulford told Badat, a former grammar school boy with a clutch of A levels, that the aims of the plot had been "self-evidently appalling". "In stark terms your objective was the murder of hundreds of unsuspecting men, women and children who happened by chance of bad luck to be travelling," he said. "Your intended victims were in no sense enemies of yours. "They would simply have been a cross-section of the public, people going about their lives in ignorance of the violent end you had planned for them." The judge said the lives of thousands of friends and relatives would have been shattered, economies threatened and fear and alarm would have been spread. "In my view, in the turbulent times in which we live . . . 50 years and possibly longer would be appropriate in such cases as this following a trial." But Badat had pleaded guilty and Mr Justice Fulford said: "It would not be in the public interest to send out a message that if a would-be terrorist turned away from death and destruction before any lives are put at risk, the courts will not reflect in a significant and real way any such genuine change of heart in the sentence which is handed down." The judge told Badat, who was training to become an imam and planning to marry when he was arrested: "I accept your change of heart was wholly genuine and in April 2005 you no longer pose a grave risk to the public." Earlier, Michael Mansfield, QC, on behalf of Badat, told the court that he had become a "courier of death" after being caught in the "vortex of global events" after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Mr Mansfield said: "He wants it to be known that the course of action he never went through with he thoroughly disapproves of. "There can never be any justification, religious, political or otherwise, for jeopardising the lives of innocent civilians. "He would suggest to those who at this moment might be contemplating planning similar acts that they should have the courage he has had to turn back, save lives. They should talk rather than fight or face a never-ending cycle of violence. Mr Mansfield said that Badat did not suddenly decide to give up the plot "in a blinding shaft of light one morning" but had become gradually disaffected. He had attended camps that were not linked to al-Qaeda, although one or two may have been associated with Osama bin Laden and later was manipulated and exploited into joining the plot. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |