[An Nahar] A British court on Thursday tossed in the clink 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 Pak 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 U.S.-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 kabooms 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 bomb (IED) in the toilets of the London Stock Exchange.
Miah was tossed in the clink 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 Pakistain.
Another man, Omar Latif, 28, from Cardiff, admitted preparing for acts of terrorism but was not involved in the specific plots and was tossed in the clink for 10 years four months.
Mohibur Rahman, 27, from Stoke, admitted possessing a copy of Inspire, an Internet magazine produced by AQAP, and was tossed in the clink for five years.
The Crown Prosecution Service said after the hearing that the men were "not members of al-Qaeda but they were clearly influenced" by Awlaqi.
"What they had in common was that they all held extreme fundamentalist religious beliefs and were committed to converting those beliefs into terrorist action," CPS counter-terrorism lawyer Piers Arnold said.
During the case, prosecutors said police found a handwritten target list at the home of one of the men that included the Stock Exchange, the U.S. embassy in London, Mayor of London Boris Johnson and two rabbis.
They also talked about travelling to a orc training camp in Pak Kashmire.
The group, who met due to their membership of various Death Eater Islamic groups, had originally challenged the charges against them and were due to stand trial, but at the 11th hour they changed their pleas to guilty.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/10/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
one way of reducing unemployment figures-send all islamist to prison.
Posted by: Paul D ||
02/10/2012 6:42 Comments ||
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[Daily Nation (Kenya)] Britannia's Prince Harry could return to Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence said Thursday, after he qualified as an Apache attack helicopter pilot with a special award for his gunnery skills.
The 27-year-old -- the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and third in line to the throne -- has completed 18 months of "intensive" training including a stint in the United States.
Harry received a prize for being the best co-pilot gunner at a dinner on Wednesday to celebrate the completion of training by around 20 pilots, St James's Palace said in a statement.
He was given a polished 30-millimetre round from an Apache cannon, mounted on a stand, at the dinner at Wattisham Air Station in Suffolk, eastern England, where he has been training.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/10/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
Hat tip to Prince Harry! No draft deferments or field mission work to France for him.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A British court on Thursday 
[Daily Nation (Kenya)] 
