5 Britons guilty of plotting nationwide attacks

updated 8:16 a.m. ET May 1, 2007

LONDON - A jury convicted five men on Monday of a plot to bomb targets in London including a popular nightclub, power plants and shopping mall, and the court for the first time revealed connections between the men and the suicide bombers who launched a deadly 2005 attack on the city’s transit system.

Details kept secret to ensure a fair trial showed that counterterrorism agents tracking the five men had also stumbled onto the transit plotters. And despite disturbing signs that the transit plot was in the works, agents failed to piece together in time to prevent the bombings that killed 52 people, testimony and official briefings during the trial showed.

The revelations are at odds with statements by Tony Blair’s government after the 2005 attack.

Senior ministers, who a month earlier had lowered the country’s alert status, said the 2005 attack was unexpected and the perpetrators unknown.

U.K.'s longest-ever terrorism trial
The jury that convicted the five men deliberated for nearly a month after nearly a year of testimony in Britain’s longest terror trial. The men, all British citizens, were accused of plotting a series of attacks using more than 1,300 pounds of fertilizer they had placed in a storage unit.

Omar Khyam was found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions made from a chemical fertilizer that could endanger life. Also found guilty in the conspiracy were Anthony Garcia, Jawad Akbar, Waheed Mahmood and Salahuddin Amin.

Two others, Nabeel Hussain and Shujah Mahmood, were cleared of conspiracy to cause explosions.

Court-imposed restrictions prohibited reporters from revealing links between the men and the four July 7, 2005 suicide transit bombers, as well as other al-Qaida cells, until the case ended.

Counterterrorism officials acknowledged that intelligence that could have raised alarms before the July 7 attacks was never thoroughly investigated, explaining they were overwhelmed by seemingly more urgent threats.

Web extra video 1,300-pound bomb vaporizes vehicle April 30: In a terrifying glimpse of what might have been, the U.S. Navy and the FBI detonate a replica of a 1,300-pound fertilizer bomb, as five convicted U.K. terror-plotters had sought to do. NBC News Web Extra

A government security official gave one-on-one briefings with reporters toward the end of the trial, detailing the path that security agents had followed.

As agents monitoring the fertilizer plot listened in on a bug, they heard one of the July 7 bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan, warn that he planned to kill non-Muslims, the security official said during the briefing, demanding anonymity to discuss sensitive details of the cases.

A tracking device was placed in Khan’s car a year before the 2005 suicide bombings and details of his phone calls and meetings with radicals were reported to Britain’s domestic spy agency, MI5, on at least four occasions, he said.

Khan also took militia training in Pakistan with at least some of the fertilizer plotters, a witness in the case and officials said.

Dots unconnected
But, lacking resources, MI5 never pieced together the shreds of intelligence, the official acknowledged.

“There needs to be that killer fact and it just wasn’t there,” he said, noting that Khan had used several aliases.

Jonathan Evans, director-general of MI5, said in a written statement that his agents would forever be disappointed they did not prevent the subway attacks, but he defended their work and said the scale of the threat was unprecedented.

“The security service will never have the capacity to investigate everyone who appears on the periphery of every operation,” Evans said. “We must be honest about what can and cannot be prevented in a democratic society that values its freedoms.”

Mohammed Junaid Babar, an American FBI al-Qaida informant, had reported that a Briton using an alias — later identified as Khan — attended a Pakistan militia camp with al-Qaida linked radicals from Britain and the United States in 2003.

With accomplice Shehzad Tanweer, Khan visited Pakistan again in 2004.

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