Passenger jet attack foiled after London bombings: police

LONDON: British police and security services foiled what they believe was an Al-Qaeda plot to down a passenger jet with a missile less than six months after the 2005 London bombings, police sources said on Monday.   

Kazi Rahman, 29, was jailed for nine years last year after admitting a charge of trying to purchase terrorist weaponry. He had links to a terrorist cell convicted Monday of plotting to use fertiliser bombs across Britain.   

Details of Rahman's case were subject to a strict contempt of court order, which meant the police information could not be reported until after a verdict on the fertiliser bomb plot trial had been returned.   

Rahman was arrested in a sting operation on November 29, 2005 trying to buy three Uzi submachine guns, silencers and 3,000 rounds of ammunition at a motorway service station near London.   

The British Muslim had been in negotiations to buy even more potentially deadly weapons -- surface to air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades -- for use against British targets, the police sources said.   

He had indicated to an undercover intelligence agent he thought was a fixer that he "might be able to raise 65,000 pounds to buy even more dangerous weaponry" for "bringing down aircraft", London's Central Criminal Court heard.   

Plans for an electricity sub-station -- which, if bombed, could have caused massive blackouts across London -- were also found at his home, along with literature about the September 11 "martyrs" and guerilla warfare.   

Rahman, a plumber, was a contact of an American called Mohammed Junaid Babar, the "supergrass" in the fertiliser bomb trial, and was allegedly a recruiter in Pakistan for the hardline Taliban regime in Afghanistan.   

He was said to have left a cache of weapons buried near a university in Lahore, which Babar claimed to have offered to Waheed Mahmood, one of the fertiliser bomb plot suspects.   

Sentencing him last year, judge David Calvert-Smith told Rahman: "I have no doubt... that what was intended was the deaths of large numbers of citizens of this country."   

Rahman was interviewed by Britain's ITN television outlet in Lahore in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when it was alleged he was acting as a Taliban recruiter.   

"I cannot wait for the day that I meet British soldiers on the battlefield and see them run," he said. "I am very happy to kill them."   

The prosecution said this showed "exactly where his sympathies lie".