UK court convicts 3 of plot to blow up airliners

LONDON -- Thousands die as airliners explode over the Atlantic Ocean and North American cities. The global economy reels. Relations between London and Washington lie in tatters.

Authorities sketched out what would have been dramatic consequences of a thwarted plot led by three British Muslims to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic jetliners with explosives hidden inside soda bottles.

The attack would have killed at least 2,000 jetliner passengers and hundreds more on the ground if bombs had been detonated over U.S. and Canadian cities. The political repercussions could have been massive.

Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, Assad Sarwar, 29, and Tanvir Hussain, 28, were convicted Monday of attempting to bomb airliners bound for the U.S. and Canada in mid-flight in what was planned as the deadliest terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001.

The case has already changed airline travel for passengers across the globe, leading to tight new limits on carryon luggage.

British and U.S. officials said the audacious plot was organized and guided by senior al-Qaida militants in Pakistan. If successful, it would have brought "murder and mayhem on an unimaginable scale," Britain's Home Secretary Alan Johnson said following the verdicts.

Other officials said the political repercussions of British Muslims murdering thousands of tourists, likely including several hundred Americans, would have been immense -- threatening to destroy ties between London and Washington.

The case is likely to spur new concerns over the U.S. visa waiver program, which allows citizens of many European Union countries -- including Britain-- to fly to the United States without visas.

Prosecutors said the men had identified seven specific flights from London's Heathrow airport to New York, Washington, San Francisco, Toronto, Montreal and two services to Chicago as their targets.

Ali, Sarwar and Hussain were convicted more than three years after police rounded up dozens of suspects in a series of dramatic dawn raids in August 2006. The arrests led to travel chaos as hundreds of airplanes were grounded across Europe, and resulted in new restrictions on the amount of liquids and gels passengers can take onto flights.

Four other men pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, but were acquitted of conspiring to blow up planes. An eighth man was cleared of all charges.

Ex-Deputy U.S. Secretary of State John Negroponte told the Senate in 2007 that the jetliner plot "would have been on a par, or something similar to 9/11."

Plotters planned to assemble bombs in airplane toilets using hydrogen peroxide-based explosives injected into soda bottles. Video footage of tests by scientists who replicated the bombs in a lab showed the devices shattering thick glass with powerful explosions.

Britain's MI5 spy agency believes the group had ambitious plans to strike as many as 18 jetliners in two waves of bombings, and to provoke further panic with attacks on U.K. power stations. Police say some would-be second wave suicide bombers have likely evaded arrest.

Investigations into the secondary plots -- and hopes of gathering evidence to link the cell to specific terrorists in Pakistan -- were curtailed as U.S. officials became increasingly nervous at the prospect of an attack on U.S.-bound jetliners and ordered the arrest of one of the group's key accomplices in Pakistan.

Rashid Rauf, a British-born baker's son, is said by intelligence officials in the U.S. and Britain to have been the key link between the U.K. and militants in Pakistan. Rauf was arrested in the central Pakistani city of Bahawalpur in early August 2006.

Peter Clarke, head of British counterterrorism policing at the time, said Rauf's arrest was a surprise in London and prompted panic. Worried the plotters would be tipped off and rush forward their plans, police rounded up dozens of suspects in hasty dawn raids on August 10, 2006.

Former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has denied there was any rift with London, but other U.S. officials acknowledge the White House was jittery.

"Given what happened on 9/11 and that this airliner plot was headed in our direction, it shouldn't come as a surprise that some here advocated taking action sooner rather than later," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

Rauf escaped from police custody in December 2007. He was the target of an American drone strike in November 2008 but intelligence officials in the U.S. and Britain say they remain unsure whether Rauf is dead or alive.

In Britain, six plotters used a dank row house in eastern London to record so-called "martyrdom" videos. "The time has come for you to be destroyed," Ali, the British organizer of the plot, said in one film, directing his anger at the American and British public.

The defendants argued in court they were filming a documentary, and had also planned a stunt involving small explosions as part of a campaign to expose supposed Western oppression of Muslims.

Jurors in London found Umar Islam, 31, guilty of a charge of conspiracy to murder, but could not decide if he was involved in targeting aircraft. They found three other men: Ibrahim Savant, 28, Arafat Waheed Khan, 28 and Waheed Zaman, 25, not guilty of planning to blow up airliners, but could not reach verdicts on whether the three men were guilty of conspiracy to murder.

All four had pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. An eighth man -- Donald Stewart-Whyte, 23 -- was cleared of all charges. His lawyers have called for a public apology from Britain's government.

The trial was the second to take place in a case which has frustrated prosecutors. Last year, Ali, Sarwar and Hussain were convicted of conspiracy to murder, but the jury could not reach a verdict on whether they specifically targeted aircraft.

Judge Richard Henriques said he would announce sentences at a hearing on Sept. 14.

Officials concede that group hadn't managed to produce a viable bomb at the time of their arrest.

A test run of the bombing was planned for the weekend of August 12, 2006, when one plotter planned to smuggle a liquid bomb kit on to an airliner, said a senior police official, who demanded anonymity to discuss details not presented to the court. He said the actual attacks were likely to have taken place in the week of August 14, 2006.

Though police failed to turn up airline tickets, or to specify precisely when the men planned to carry out the attacks, security officials insist the group was ready to strike and were well advanced in fine tuning the mixture of chemicals required to create their liquid bombs.

"We believe that they were days away, no more than a week" said the senior police official.

Sarwar flew to Islamabad in June 2006, likely to discuss final details with al-Qaida organizers, the police official said. Investigators believe Abu Ubaidah al-Masri, an Egyptian regarded by both U.S. and British intelligence as a senior al-Qaida figure in Pakistan was the key organizer of the plot.

Al-Masri, who died of hepatitis in Pakistan in December 2007, is also suspected of a role in orchestrating the July 7, 2005 bombing attacks on London, which killed 52 subway and bus commuters.

Prosecutor Peter Wright told the court that plotters in Britain were "entirely under the control and direction of Pakistan," and produced coded e-mails between the British men and unknown militants overseas.

A British security official, who demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the case, said the plot bore echoes of a 1995 plan to down airliners bound from the Philippines to the U.S.

"It reflects the leadership's obsession with aircraft and with going for the big spectacular," he said. "They've tried it before and they'll probably come back to it again."