BRITAIN:Four men have been convicted of plotting to bomb London's transport system on July 21st, 2005, in a botched attempt to replicate Islamist suicide bombings that had killed 52 people two weeks earlier.
Police said the men, Muslims of African origin, would have caused carnage on a similar scale to the attacks a fortnight before but although the detonators on their makeshift bombs fired, the main charges failed to explode.
The attacks provoked more panic and fear across Britain, reeling from the most devastating peacetime attack on London, carried out on July 7th by four young Britons - the first Islamist suicide bombings in western Europe.
Muktah Said Ibrahim, Yassin Hassan Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Hussain Osman were found guilty yesterday of conspiracy to murder at Woolwich Crown Court in London after a trial lasting almost six months.
The moment Ibrahim and Mohammed tried to detonate their bombs was caught on CCTV footage. Mohammed could be seen turning his rucksack, containing the bomb, to face a young mother with a small child just as he detonated it.
The jury, which is still considering verdicts against two other men facing the same charge, was sent home for the day.
The convicted four claimed the bombings were a hoax, not designed to kill, but were a protest against Britain's involvement in Iraq. Eritrean-born Ibrahim, the self-confessed bomb-maker and the plot's mastermind, said the bombs were deliberately designed not to explode but only to go "pop".
Police and prosecutors said it was just luck that the bombs had not worked, either because the men had mixed the ingredients wrongly, the detonator was not powerful enough or the hot weather had affected the explosives.
Although the plot was hatched many months before, the men had picked out underground trains and a bus as targets to echo the July 7th attacks . - (Reuters)