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Five British Pakistanis jailed on terror charges

LONDON: Five British Pakistani youths, accused of being “intoxicated” by extremist propaganda, were on Thursday jailed for planning to go to Pakistan to train as “jihadis” in order to fight British forces in Afghanistan.

Four were university students, identified as Aitzaz Zafar (20), Awaab Iqbal (20), Usman Ahmed Malik (21) and Akbar Butt (20) — and the fifth a schoolboy, Mohammed Irfan Raja (19). All were found guilty of possessing terrorist material. They are to serve jail sentences ranging from two to three years each.

During their trial at the Old Bailey, the prosecution claimed that the material seized during the investigation included an al-Qaeda manual and diagrams of explosive devices. Their conversations on the net contained passages justifying suicide bombings, it was alleged.

But the defendants denied these charges.

The alleged plot reportedly came to light when Raja ran away from his east London home in February last year leaving behind a note telling his parents that he would now meet them in “jannat” (paradise).

In the note, he assured them that he was not going to do “something in this country”. “Just in case you think I am going to do something in this country you can rest easy that I am not. The conventional method of warfare is safer,” he reportedly wrote.

Prosecution said Raja was recruited by the other four — all students of Bradford University — on the Internet. They were arrested after Raja returned home when his parents managed to contact him and begged him to come back. Sentencing the five, the judge told them “You were intoxicated by the extremist nature of the material each one of you collected — the songs, images and the language of violent jihad. And so carried away by that material were you that each of you crossed the line.”

Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command, said it was not an “adolescent fantasy” and the five seriously intended to become “active jihadists”.

“It is clear that these men were intent on committing terrorism overseas. The extremist material they all possessed was designed to assist them in that purpose, but their efforts were frustrated by police action at an early stage,” he said.

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