A British court handed down lengthy prison sentences on Friday to seven men who served as accomplices to al-Qaeda terrorists planning spectacular attacks in the US and Britain.
The attacks planned by the group included plots to cause buildings to collapse by detonating limousines packed with explosives and to explode a radiation bomb that would have caused "fear, panic and widespread disruption," Peter Clarke, Britain's senior counterterrorism police officer, said in a statement.
The targets in the US included the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup headquarters in New York, along with the offices in Washington of the IMF and the World Bank, said prosecutors in a lengthy series of trials.
The mastermind behind the attack plans was Dhiren Barot, 34, a British convert to Islam described by the police as a senior figure in al-Qaeda. Arrested in 2004, he was sentenced to a minimum of 40 years last November, which was later reduced to 30 years because he had not tried to carry out his plans.
The case drew close attention among counterterrorism and civil liberties specialists, because most of the evidence had come "not from surveillance but from inquiries carried out after they were arrested," Clarke said.
"There was painstaking examination of the mass of material found during searches," he said. "A huge amount of this material was on computers, some of it encrypted or deleted."
Clarke did not refer specifically to a fiery debate in Britain over whether the period of permissible detention without charge for terrorism suspects should be extended to 90 days from 28.
But his remarks reinforced previous arguments by the police that modern terrorism inquiries need much more time, to permit the police to carry out complicated investigations that require advanced code-breaking and language skills across international frontiers.
Of the seven who were sentenced on Friday, only one, Qaisar Shaffi, 28, had denied the charges and stood trial. He was convicted of conspiracy to murder and sentenced to 15 years. Shaffi was said by prosecutors to have accompanied Barot to New York on what was depicted as a reconnaissance mission in March 2001.
The other six men had admitted to charges of conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life.
"Each one of you was recruited by Barot and assisted him at his request," Judge Alexander Butterfield told the defendants. "Anyone who chooses to participate in such a plan will receive little sympathy from the courts."
Any suffering caused to their families, the judge told them, "is but a tiny fraction of the suffering that would have been experienced had your plans been translated into reality."
The sentences against the men -- Shaffi; Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, 27; Junade Feroze, 31; Zia Ul Haq, 28; Abdul Aziz Jalil, 34; Omar Abdur Rehman, 23; and Nadeem Tarmohamed, 29 -- ranged from 15 to 26 years.
The British police released detailed summaries of the evidence to support the accusation that the men had helped Barot.
"They were the trusted few who researched and carried out reconnaissance and supported Barot," Clarke said. "Each had a different role to play.
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