Muslims trained in U.K. for terror

Muslims trained in U.K. for terror

Watermelons used in practice for beheadings
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
David Stringer
Associated Press
London -- Clad in mud-smeared combat fatigues, the young Muslims trained on picturesque British farmland, hurling imaginary grenades, wielding sticks as mock rifles and chopping watermelons in simulated beheadings.

A four-year inquiry, which came to a close Tuesday with guilty pleas from the last two of seven gang members, has exposed a network of alleged British terrorism training camps meant to prepare recruits for mass murder.

Security officials believe hundreds of men -- including a gang that made a failed attempt to bomb London's transit network -- passed through camps set up across the English countryside.

Investigators say it was a worrying discovery at the heart of Britain's homegrown terrorism: training camps once thought to be exclusive to northern Pakistan or Afghanistan are being held in sleepy rural England.

"The exposure to that ideology -- that radicalism, that extremism, that them-and-us' mind set -- starts here on our streets in Britain," a former extremist, Ed Husain, told Britain's first police counterterrorism conference in Brighton.

Husain said British officials had been too tolerant of Islamic radicalism taught in universities and mosques during the 1980s and '90s.

The two training camp ringleaders will be sentenced next month on charges of running the camps and inciting participants to murder.

Their convictions -- two Tuesday, one last year and the rest last week following a four-month trial -- could be reported for the first time Tuesday after a judge lifted restrictions banning publi- cation of de tails of the case.

Prosecutors told a court hearing that the men set up camps in idyl lic spots across England to train in military skills.

National parks in the Lake District of northern England, the New Forest in the south and quiet corners of the southern counties of Berkshire, Kent and East Sussex were all used for training, including a former school.

Officials fear the case shows that British Muslims can be radicalized, trained and funded to carry out terror attacks -- without ever leaving the country.

Officials said the ringleaders of the camps were two London-based preachers -- Atilla Ahmet, who once said in a CNN interview that he was "the No. 1 al-Qaida in Europe," and Mohammed Hamid, who gave himself the nickname "Osama bin London."

Ahmet is a longtime aide to radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian the United States is attempting to extradite over the alleged plan to set up terrorist training camps in Oregon.

Hamid, originally from Tanzania, hand-picked recruits from mainstream mosques, inviting them for radical meetings at his home and then selecting a smaller number to attend the camps, police said.

Prosecutors said Hamid was candid about his hope that recruits could dwarf the scale of the 2005 London bombings. He hoped they would carry out six or seven major attacks before London hosted the 2012 Olympics, prosecutors said.

"Fifty-two. That's not even breakfast for me," Hamid said, referring to the number killed in the 2005 bombings, in a recording from a secret bug installed in his home that was played at his trial.

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