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November 7, 2006

UK: Islamist Gets Life Imprisonment

The case of Dhiren Barot came to an end today. At Woolwich Crown Court around midday, Mr Justice Butterfield passed a life sentence. The judge took into account the fact that Barot had pleaded guilty, and said that he had wished to give him a tariff of eighty years' jail, considering the gravitas of Barot's plots. He told Barot that he would serve no less than forty years.

Barot will be free when he is 74, if prison authorities and future Home Secretaries do not offer parole. Barot appeared shocked when he was sentenced.

Mr Justice Butterfield said: "This was no noble cause. Your plans were to bring indiscriminate carnage, bloodshed and butchery first in Washington, New York and Newark, and thereafter the UK on a colossal and unprecedented scale."

"Your intention was not simply to cause damage, panic or fear. Your intention was to murder, but it went further. It was designed to strike at the very heart of democracy and the security of the state. And if successful, would have affected thousands personally, millions indirectly and ultimately the whole nation of the US and the UK."

The Times quotes Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism unit, who said: "By his own admission Barot wanted to commit mass murder on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the leader of the plot. If he had succeeded, hundreds if not thousands could have died...."

"...Barot was a determined and experienced terrorist. He went to terrorist training camps in 1995, long before 9/11, or the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq. He is not someone who has recently been attracted to the terrorist cause. He is a full-time terrorist. His training showed through. He used anti-surveillance, coded messages and secret meetings, but he could not evade capture. He was stopped before he could attack the British and American people."

Born in Baroda in the Indian state of Gujarat to Hindu parents, Dhiren Barot was brought to Britain as a baby, and lived in Kingsbury, northwest London. He remained a Hindu until his 20s, when he finally converted to Islam.

Barot had plotted to kill thousands of people. He wanted to hire stretch limousines, pack them with gas canisters, and park them in underground car-parks, where they would be detonated. This project, the "Gas Bombs Project" was intended to be synchronized with others. He planned to use Americium-241 to create a radiological dispersion device or "dirty bomb". Americium can be obtained from smoke detectors.

He also had plans to attack targets in the United States and Britain.

He traveled extensively from 1995 onwards. Between February 1998 and November 2001, he reported on five occasions that his passport had been lost or stolen, and had it replaced. He used various fake aliases thereafter, and had two passports issued to him under his assumed identities.

Barot had received terror training abroad. He went to Kotti in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in 1995, where he spent five months in a terror training camp, again earning how to use weapons and explosives. He said that while in Kotti, he was "witnessing a side of Islam which cannot be found in classrooms." Much of what he learned would be published later in a book on Kashmiri jihad.

His book "The Army of Madinah in Kashmir", published in 1999 under his pseudonym 'Esa al-Hindi by Maktabah Al Ansar publishers, (316, Ladypool Road, Sparkhill, Birmingham B12 6JY) can be downloaded in pdf format HERE.

He wrote here that "A great burden for the Muslim fighters living out in the open is the blood sucking swarms of mosquitoes that constantly torment them" and noted that "thousands upon thousands of guest mujahideen are being slaughtered at a phenomenal pace."

He condemned the Pakistani secret service, the ISI for duping young men to act as "pawns in the game that adequately serve as cannon fodder, performing the country's dirty work."

"Jihad has many great spheres and it would be a misconception to confine it simply to the mountain-tops of foreign countries, as we are so prone to do. Instead we are forced to ask the question, do we put the fear of Allah into the enemies of al Islam?"

It is assumed that while in Kashmir, Barot had met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had been the planner of the 9/11 attacks, and it was here that he became involved with Al Qaeda.

In 1998 he was in Thailand, where he married, though what became of his wife thereafter is unknown.

Barot was in the Philippines in October 1999, where he attended the Hudaybiyah camp, which was run by the terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, which went on to bomb Bali in 2002 and 2005, as well as other targets. Hambali, who then led Jemaah Islamiyah, has said that he gave Barot contact addresses in California and South Africa. Hambali is now in Guantanamo bay, after being transferred there from a secret US jail. While in Hudaybiyah, Barot received training in small arms use, mortars and explosives handling.

In the United States in 2001, five months before 9.11, Barot made a video of his proposed targets. The video had been been found, sandwiched within a copy of a Bruce Willis video - Die Hard: Back With a Vengeance, which details terror explosions in New York. On this video, there is a moment where he makes the sound of an explosion as he pans over one potential target. The video had been discovered in a garage in London. An edited verion can be found here, and an unedited copy here (Windows media player documents).

On his hard disk, Barot had compiled his proposed strategies, filed under innocuous titles, such as "Holiday Pictures". For the planned assault on the Prudential building in Newark, which he first wrote of on September 2, 2001, he revised his plans 21 times.

He had written of his planned attack on the Citigroup building in New York that an operative had already been into the building to survey it for security shortfalls. In an amendment from February 2003, he wrote of this building: "Like the World Trade Center was, it is supported not a steel frame but on steel load-bearing walls."

In Britain, Barot had attended prayer meetings which were hosted by Abdullah el-Faisal, the Jamaican-born convert and Saudi-funded preacher of terror. Faisal was jailed for seven years in March 2003, for inciting murder and racial hatred. This preacher had asserted that it was "acceptable" for Jews, Americans and Hindus to be murdered with chemical weapons.

Barot saw that el-Faisal had black bodyguards with relatives in Montana, USA. He traveled to the US to try to recruit these to his cause.

On his hard disk he wrote of the potential effects of a bomb exploding on a tube train traveling beneath the river Thames: "Imagine the chaos that would be caused if a powerful explosion were to rip through here and actually rupture the river itself. This would cause pandemonium, what with the explosions, flooding, drowning, etc that would occur/result."

A comprehensive list of Barot's documents has been compiled by the Metropolitan Police press bureau. All of Barot's documents are there for anyone to read, but obviously, for security reasons, sensitive information (such as the details of the radiological dispersion device) contain passages which have been blacked out.

(Information sourced from the Guardian, Times, Telegraph and Independent).

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at November 7, 2006 10:01 AM

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