British Muslim terror gang convicted

Irfan Khalid and Irfan Naseer at Birmingham airport en route to Pakistan

Unemployed gang leader Irfan Naseer 31, is a "mummy's boy" according to his mother.   He's also a pharmacy graduate.  Police have recordings of him saying "They wanna have sex like donkeys in the street, they wanna club, act like animals and why shouldn't we terrorize them, tell me that?  You think about it, if someone came into your house, yeah, and started dancing throughout the night and started basically having orgies and smoking drugs and stuff... you would terrorize them, innit."

Irfan Naseer

Irfan Naseer 31, Irfan Khalid 27 and Ashik Ali 27, all from Birmingham, were convicted of plotting to kill as many British people as they could, by placing bombs in shopping centres and railway stations across the UK.

Irfan Khalid

They were inspired by hate preacher, American-born Anwar al-Awlaki's online sermons.  Two men went to Pakistan to learn how to make the bombs, then came home to their council-funded flat in Birmingham, to make them.  

Ashik Ali

The gang had a vivid imagination.  They thought about mixing poison into creams like Vaseline and Nivea and smearing it on car door handles.  Another plan was to weld knife blades onto the front of trucks and run into groups of people.

They raised money for their cause by posing as charity workers but lost it all playing foreign currency markets and had to take out loans.

Prosecutor Brian Altman QC told the jury:  "The defendants were proposing to detonate up to eight rucksack bombs in a suicide attack and/or detonate bombs on timers in crowded areas in order to cause mass death and casualties."

The CIA killed their hero Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone attack in 2011 but he still speaks from the grave, his videos were found across Britain in private homes and bookshops.  Anwar Awlaki was also responsible for persuading Nigerian Omar Farouk Abdulmuttalab to put explosives in his underwear and blow up a plane en route to America on Christmas Day 2009.  

 Anwar al-Awlaki

But nobody from the Muslim community told authorities what was going on.  We know they knew because the families of four other men who were recruited and sent to Pakistan for terror training, all intervened and brought their sons home to England immediately they  found out the real reason they were sent there.

But nobody came forward to tell police what they were planning - to kill as many Britons as they could.