How MI5 got lucky with hotline call
By Philip Johnston, Duncan Gardham and Caroline Davies http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/news/200 7/05/01/nplot101.xml <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/news/20 07/05/01/nplot101.xml&site=5&page=0> &site=5&page=0 The plot All intelligence operations need a stroke of luck. MI5's came with a call to their anti-terrorist hotline in February 2004. CCTV camera catches Omar Khyam examining the bag of fertiliser at Access Self-Storage in Hanwell, west London <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2007/05/01/nplot101a.jpg> A CCTV camera catches Omar Khyam examining the bag of fertiliser at Access Self-Storage in west London Emma Wallis, who worked at Access Self-Storage in Hanwell, west London, had a story to tell. Three young Muslim men had rented a locker and placed a big bag of fertiliser there. They said it was for an allotment but there was enough - about 600kg - to cover four or five football pitches. Miss Wallis told her boyfriend who advised her to contact MI5 and the police. It was to prove a crucial call. Over at Thames House, the HQ of MI5 in London, the names of two of the men were of instant interest. They were Omar Khyam and Anthony Garcia, both of whom were suspected of involvement in a terrorist plot and were already under surveillance. They were targets for Operation Crevice, which had started almost a year earlier as an investigation into a terrorist back-up and support network based in Luton. advertisement Evidence would later be given in court that this was being run by a man called Mohammed Quayam Khan - known as Q - who was providing funds, equipment and, possibly, individuals to al-Qa'eda. They would allegedly be sent out to Pakistan through trusted couriers and family members. Money was allegedly passed on to Salahuddin Amin, a British citizen from Luton living on the Pakistan-Afghan border, who had links to al-Qa'eda commanders based there. At the time, this was just one of more than 100 networks being monitored by MI5. But it became a lot more sinister when an email was traced from Amin to a British Muslim from a middle class home in Crawley, Sussex. Omar Khyam and his brother Shujah had been brought up by their single mother and grandparents after their father left when Omar was 10. His family were well-established in Crawley. His grandfather had served in the Royal Signals in India during the Second World War. He moved to Britain in the 1970s, working in factories. Khyam, who attended Hazlewick School in Crawley, was not especially academic but excelled in sports and was captain of the cricket XI. As an adolescent he was not political or overly religious. But after disappointing GCSEs, he began to take his religion more seriously, praying five times a day. He moved to a college in Redhill, Surrey, to take his A-levels and became involved with al-Muhajiroun, a radical group led by Omar Bakri Mohammed, the radical preacher, who showed him videos of Muslims being killed in Bosnia and Chechnya. On a family holiday to Pakistan, Khyam fell under the influence of the mujahideen. In 2000 he returned to spend three months in the mountains of Kashmir training with Kalashnikovs, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. He was brought back to Britain by his family, who hoped to turn him away from radical Islam. But a potential terrorist had been born. He began recruiting a cell. This, then, was the man to whom MI5 had been led. Unknown to them at that stage was that Khyam, most of his gang and the July 7 bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan had already been to a training camp in Pakistan where Khyam had learned the basic skills necessary for bomb-making. Had they known, it would have made the email they had seen even more alarming than it already was. It centred on the ingredients needed to build a fertilizer bomb. Khyam said he already had some components and needed to know where to go next. By this time, he had as many as 10 close associates, who all had to be watched by MI5. Suddenly, what had been a small operation expanded into the largest counter-terrorist investigation seen at the time. The main participants were watched around the clock and their homes and cars bugged. What MI5 heard confirmed that they were dealing with a serious plot. There were discussions about targets. Planes, nightclubs, football matches, shopping centres, even Prime Minister's Questions were all considered as the men, unaware they were being bugged, talked through the pros and cons of different types of attack. In one conversation Khyam and Jawad Akbar, an old school friend, mused over the possibility of a suicide mission involving a British Airways plane. Khyam: "Imagine: you've got a plane, 300 people on it, you buy tickets for 30 brothers in there. They're massive brothers, you just crash the plane. You could do it easy. It's just an idea." Akbar: "Thirty brothers - to find 30 brothers willing to commit suicide is a big thing." Khyam: "If you spoke to some serious brothers, to the right people, you'd probably get it, bro." Khyam added: "The beauty of it is they don't have to fly into a building, just crash the flipping thing." In another conversation the two talked of targeting one of Britain's largest nightclubs, the Ministry of Sound in London. Akbar: "You're thinking airports, yeah. What about stuff like easy, easy stuff where you don't need no experience and nothing? You could get a job like, for example, the biggest nightclub in central London. No one can turn around and say, 'Oh, they were innocent', those slags dancing around. Do you understand what I mean? Khyam: "If you got a job in a bar, yeah, or a club, say the Ministry of Sound, what are you planning to do there, then?" Akbar: "Blow the whole thing up." At one point, Akbar wonders: "Bruv, just before we . . . you don't think this place is bugged do you?" Khyam replies: "No, I don't think it's bugged at all. I don't even think the car's bugged." Bluewater shopping centre in Kent was considered on another occasion when Waheed Mahmood, suggested to Khyam: "Bluewater's only an hour's walk . . . local . . . tomorrow if you want, right? A little explosion . . . I don't know how big it would be . . . but might as well do one to see what it's like . . . do one tomorrow if you wanted to . . ." In fact the plans the conspirators considered even included poisoning beer, according to supergrass Mohammed Babar who told the jury that in Pakistan, Waheed had told him: "You could get a job in a soccer stadium as a beer vendor. You just put poison in a syringe, injecting it in a can and put a sticker on it, which would stop it leaking and give it out." Expanding on the food poisoning idea, Waheed added: "You didn't have to start a restaurant. You could make up flyers. It would just have a phone number and they could call up and order food and you just poison their food." It was in Pakistan, too, that Khyam, while watching television, talked about blowing up Tony Blair. He would tell the jury that was "a joke". "I remember I was watching on a Wednesday, the Prime Minister's Questions, and we just made a comment, 'Can you imagine if you dropped a bomb right there and then? You would take out all the MPs." During the surveillance, the gang spoke of hitting gas, water and electricity supplies. Police would find 12 CD-roms with information relating to national high pressure gas and high voltage electricity network run by National Grid Transco. They also contained information on 4,200 miles of underground pipelines and 24 compressor stations for natural gas along with 4,500 miles of overhead line and 341 electricity sub stations. After the gang's arrest a list of synagogues was found, including ones in London, Oxford, St Albans and Manchester as well as in Spain and Portugal. There was even a tentative attempt to obtain a radioactive isotope "suitcase bomb'' from the Russian mafia. Amin confessed to police that al-Qa'eda wanted to do something that would be "bigger than 9/11", although they spent a lot of money on pursuing a device that did not exist. However, the fertilizer plot was real enough - but where was the explosive? Fortuitously, Miss Wallis's phone call provided the missing piece of the jigsaw. Police set up cameras at the storage depot and filmed Khyam checking the fertilizer - which had been substituted for an inert substance. Police could have moved in, but there were many loose ends. Where, for instance, were the detonators? Who would provide the expertise to make the bomb? The answer was allegedly provided with the arrival on the scene of Momin Khawaja, a Canadian explosives expert. He spent two days in the UK and, according to the evidence, showed Khyam a timer and detonator. This, it was clear, was not intended to be a suicide plot. In late 2003, Khawaja allegedly worked in Canada on a remote-controlled detonation for a December attack but it was claimed it took until January for him to get the device working. In February, 2004, he flew to London allegedly to explain to them how it would work. The key planning meeting was held at a house in Crawley. Among the peripheral members of the wider network who attended were two Yorkshire Muslims whose names would be associated with the worst terrorist atrocity on British soil the following July- Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. MI5 watched as the plotters gathered at the home of Waseem Gulzar in Crawley. Earlier Khyam had driven Khawaja back to his flat in Slough, Berks. A bug in the car picked up their alleged conversation. "We don't want to mix many things together because if you start to mix too many people in this life you're going to get yourself caught," said Khyam. Khawaja was allegedly recorded explaining to him how to make a remote-controlled explosion. Later in the afternoon they drove to Langley Green mosque in Crawley. Sidique Khan, who was in Khyam's 4x4, asked him: "You're seriously basically a terrorist?" Khyam told him: "I'm not a terrorist, they're working through us." Sidique Khan replied: "Who are? There's no one higher than you." Khyam told him of his plans to leave for Pakistan and Sidique Khan asked him: "This one-way ticket bruv, yeah?'' Alerted to the gang's plans to leave for Pakistan, MI5 and Scotland Yard knew it was time to make their move. They had recorded 3,500 hours of conversations between the gang and their contacts around the world. In the early hours of March 30 2004 an international operation swung into action. In Britain, they moved in on the gang. In Canada, Khawaja was arrested. Pakistani police raided Amin's house, although he had fled. In the US, Babar, another contact, was arrested. Operation Crevice was the point at which they realized the real danger was home-grown. One of the gangs' ambitions had been to organise simultaneous attacks. Babar told of how Khyam, when in Pakistan in 2003 went into the tribal areas to meet Abu Munthir, an al Qa'eda leader who had also spent time in Luton. "They had wanted to see him to discuss what they were planning in the UK and they wanted ideas and suggestions from him" he later said. On Khyam's return, Babar said, he began to talk of simultaneous attacks. "He wanted to do multiple bombings at the same time, simultaneous or one after the other on the same day." Khyam was heard telling Akbar: "You have a proper plan, simultaneous, it's got to be big and effective". He warned Akbar to talk to those "running the Jihad [Holy War]" in Pakistan. To those in M15 listening and watching, the gang's intentions were clear. Khyam, who believed Britain was a "kufr" a heathen country, told Akbar: "They just need to be killed and blood spilled. To me this is clear. "The verse says lay in ambush for them, besiege them and kill them when you find them. To me that's just clear. Kill them." _____ Cost of investigation The £50 million investigation and prosecution of the plotters was the largest operation against Muslim extremists in this country. The court case lasted more than a year, making it the second longest criminal trial in history after the London Underground Jubilee Line fraud case. Seven locations were covered by video surveillance during the investigation. Listening devices were placed in Omar Khayam's flat and 4x4 as well as Jawad Akbar's flat and Anthony Garcia's car. Watching the suspects took 34,000 man-hours, while 7,600 people were involved in the investigation. Police began the first of 28 raids and follow-up searches at 6am on March 30, 2004. At the trial, the prosecution called 101 witnesses. Childcare problems meant one juror was not available before 10.30am for most of the case. During Ramadan, the court could only sit for three-and-a-half hours a day. (F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with "Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The Copyright Act of 1976. 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