A man who faced accusations that he was plotting to mount an
Islamic State-inspired gun or bomb attack on the streets of London has
been acquitted after a highly secretive Old Bailey trial.
Erol Incedal, 27, was cleared of
preparation of acts of terrorism after a four-week retrial in which large parts
of the evidence were heard inside a locked courtroom.
Incedal broke down and wept as the jury
returned a majority verdict after 27 hours of deliberation.
Last year Incedal, a law student from
south London, was convicted of possession of a five-page bomb-making manual on
a memory card, but faced the retrial because the original jury had been unable
to agree a verdict on the more serious charge of plotting a terrorist attack.
He will be sentenced for the earlier
verdict next Wednesday along with his friend Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, also 27
and from south London, who admitted possession of the manual at an earlier
hearing.
The juries at each trial heard that a
listening device was placed inside Incedal’s Mercedes after he was stopped
while speeding in west London in September 2013. He was subsequently recorded
as he discussed plans to buy a gun.
He told the court he wanted to buy a gun
because he planned to deal in drugs and believed he needed to protect himself.
He also said that that although he had been carrying a memory card with the
bomb-making manual stored on it at the time of his arrest, he
believed he had a “reasonable excuse” for having it in his possession.
However, such is the secrecy surrounding
the case that it is not currently possible to report on the basis for that
belief. Nor is it possible to report on other significant parts of the evidence
that Incedal put forward in his defence.
Nonetheless, the jury, who did hear all
the evidence, was clearly not satisfied that the prosecution had made out its
case beyond reasonable doubt, and acquitted Incedal of the charge.
A small number of journalists
were permitted to attend some of the sessions held in secret, but
they have been warned they will be committing an offence if they disclose what
they heard, unless the trial judge, Sir Andrew Nicol, lifts the extensive
reporting restrictions.
It remains unclear
whether Nicol will do so. Lawyers representing the media may appeal against any
refusal.
The appeal court ruled that up to 10
journalists should be permitted to attend “the bulk” of the trial, but some
sessions were heard in complete secrecy.
The reasons for the secrecy cannot
currently be reported. However, the appeal court’s judgment, a public document,
noted that national security was “the raison d’etre” of MI5 and MI6, and that
“from time to time, tensions between the open justice principle and national
security will be inevitable”.
The jury heard that Incedal had taken an
interest in the group now known as Islamic State. When police stopped him in
Ealing, west London, in September 2013, and searched his E-Class Mercedes, a
piece of paper bearing the address of the London home of Tony and Cherie Blair
was found inside his Versace glasses case.
Over the next two hours, while he was
being held at a police station in west London and questioned about a number of
motoring offences, a listening device was wired into the vehicle, and an
investigation codenamed Operation Vendible was launched.
Over the next 13 days, the device
captured all the conversations Incedal had in the car with his wife, his
brother-in-law and two friends. Key conversations were used in evidence against
him.
Eight days after it was installed,
Incedal was recorded discussing plans to purchase a firearm. He
told Rarmoul-Bouhadjar to keep in touch when purchasing the weapon: “Update me
at every stage and just say the sausage is nice, erm, there’s enough sauce in
it.” Rarmoul-Bouhadjar asked: “What’s the sausage?” Incedal replied: “Bullets.
If there’s not enough sauce in it, you’ll have to make that decision if we’re
going to take it or not.”
In the event, Incedal said, he had not
purchased either a firearm or any drugs.
Thirteen days after the listening device
was installed, Incedal and Rarmoul-Bouhadjar were travelling in the Mercedes
when armed police forced the car to a halt near Tower Bridge in London and shot
out the tyres to prevent any escape.
The two men were arrested and were found
to be in possession of almost-identical SD memory cards wrapped in masking tape
and concealed inside their iPhone cases. Stored on each of the cards were a
number of documents concerning explosives, including the five-page bomb-making
manual.
Ministry of Defence forensic explosives
experts dismissed some of those instructions as farcical. However, some gave
accurate guidance for the production of a variety of viable explosive
substances, and for the construction of a detonator using a number of easily
acquired objects.
Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, an economics
graduate, pleaded guilty last year to a charge under the Terrorism Act 2000 of
possessing a document, on or before 13 October 2013, that was “likely to be
useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. A second
charge, of possessing a false passport, was withdrawn.
The court also heard an examination of
Incedal’s Acer laptop revealed traces of emails and Skype messages between an
account he had set up the previous July, using the name tom13, and a hotmail
account named fatimahamoodieight.
The examination also showed that Incedal
had been communicating with another person, thought to be in the Middle East,
who was using an email account in the name of Zaynab Alawi.
The pair exchanged a number of messages referring to “straps” –
slang for firearms. One exchange referred to “k 1122aaa shhh etc”, which the
prosecution suggested was a code for Kalashnikovs, and “mo88m ssbayy style”,
said to be a reference to an attack on a hotel, such as that carried out in Mumbai
in November 2008.
The jury was able to consider Incedal’s
explanation for these communicatons, but due to the secrecy surrounding the
case, that explanation cannot be reported.
Incedal told the jury how he and his
siblings had been born in Turkey to a father who was a Kurdish communist and a
mother who was from a Turkoman background and an Alawite. His father had died when
he was six weeks old, and a year later his mother moved the family to London.
An older sister later died while fighting for the Kurdish separatist group the
PKK.
A slightly built, bearded man, Incedal
gave an account from the witness box of a troubled upbringing in the
neighbourhood around Elephant and Castle in south-east London: being excluded
from primary school, threatened with exclusion from secondary school and his
conviction for attempted theft, an offence that he committed aged 12.
At 14, during Ramadan, he joined other
Muslim boys who were allowed out of school to attend a local mosque. However,
he and a friend would slip off and hang out in bookmakers’ shops and kebab
restaurants. Eventually he agreed to go to the mosque with the other boys, but
only because he “didn’t want them to grass us up”.
Before long, he said, he became involved
with the global Islamic religious movement Tablighi
Jamaat, which he said gave him the opportunity for
“self-rectification” and a chance to learn more about Islam. He travelled
widely with the group, to Greece, India, Bangladesh and New York.
He was married by the age of 17 to a
girl the same age. While still young they had three children, and were living
with relatives or in temporary accommodation.
In 2009, Incedal enrolled on a law and
accountancy course at London South Bank University and received a student loan.
Despite his limited income, the jury has
heard evidence that Incedal was enjoying a free-spending lifestyle. The
listening device picked up evidence of him counting out £1,000, in order to
purchase a firearm. In another recording, Incedal is heard to state: “Money –
it’s easy. Yeah?”
As with so much about the case, other
sources of Incedal’s money must, for the time being, remain a mystery:
following his acquittal, the small group of reporters who have heard some of
the secret evidence cannot disclose whether they have learned where it was
coming from.
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