Terror Attacks in the UK Averted: Suspects Plead Guilty

In December, 2010, UK police officers, actually members of a specialist, undercover, anti-terrorist unit, arrested 9 men suspected of planning terrorist attacks on targets mainly, but probably not only, in London. Today (1 February), four of them pleaded guilty to various charges and, along with the other 5 who pleaded guilty earlier, they will be sentenced either later this week or next week. The Community Security Trust (CST) of the Board of Deputies of British Jews has a fascinating article on these men. They note that, from the various reports on them, that:

It emerged that those who admitted planning to target the London Stock Exchange wanted to send five mail bombs to various targets during the run up to Christmas 2010 and discussed launching a “Mumbai-style” atrocity."

Beyond that, a "hand-written target list discovered at the home of one of the radical Islamists listed the names and addresses of London Mayor Boris Johnson, two rabbis, the US embassy and the Stock Exchange.The conspiracy was stopped by undercover anti-terror police before firm dates could be set for attacks.

It gets even more interesting: within the article by the CST is a link to a Home Office document  which lists all the proscribed (i.e., banned as terrorist) organisations in the UK. It says that there are 47 of them. I counted 37 of them as being Islamist/Jihadi. By my arithmetic, that makes over 3/4 of of banned organisations Islamist/Jihadi in a country in which, at most, 2.0% of the population are Moslem. In turn, most of those will just want to get on with their lives and will not to create a Moslem UK, let alone elevate sharia law above all other law.

When Brits want to be unkind as to the efficiency of their police, we refer to them as (collectively) "PC (for Police Constable) Plod". After all, it took them 3 days to catch up with Sheikh Raheed, with his publicised itinerary. However, we do malign them: here, they appear to have done a magnificent job and, hopefully, averted a large degree of carnage.

By Brian Goldfarb.