BRITAIN:A British court yesterday jailed a group of British Muslim students for a total of 13 years.
They had collected a library of al-Qaeda propaganda and intended to travel to Afghanistan to fight coalition forces. The five Muslim men linked up online with sympathisers in Pakistan and the US and held video conferences over the internet where they discussed violent jihad.
They were caught after the parents of one of the students contacted police.Schoolboy Irfan Raja had run away from home in February 2006 when he was 17, leaving a suicide note. "If not in this dunyad we will meet in Jannat ," the note stated.
When his parents looked on his computer they found speeches by Osama bin Laden calling for Muslims to take revenge on the West for invading Islamic lands and other speeches, prosecuting counsel told a the court.
Raja had gone to meet four students from Bradford University in the north of England whom he had befriended on the internet, and who intended to go to training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. However the next day, he returned home after speaking to his parents by phone and was then arrested.
Detectives uncovered a wealth of material on the men's computers. This included justification for suicide bombings, the need for terror training and cover stories for travelling abroad.
Propaganda was also discovered as well as extracts from the al-Qaeda training manual, including diagrams of triggering devices and a list of the most popular types of explosive.
Raja, now 19, Aitzaz Zafar (19), Usman Malik (20), Akber Butt (20) and Awaab Iqbal (20) were all found guilty of possessing articles for terrorist purposes.They each received two to three-year jail terms.