All-female gang ‘plotted knife terror rampage at Westminster’
BRITAIN’S first female terror hit squad planned to attack the Palace of Westminster in a plot codenamed ‘A Mad Hatter’s tea party’, a court heard yesterday.
A mother and her two daughters were secretly recorded discussing an ‘Alice in Wonderland party’, which was code for a deadly knife rampage on the Houses of Parliament, it was alleged.
Safaa Boular, 18, is accused of recruiting her mother Mina Dich, 43, and sister Rizlaine, 21, to join the terror plot after she was inspired by an Islamic State fighter in Syria whom she planned to marry via Skype.
The would-be jihadi bride instructed her family from prison after being arrested for plotting a gun and grenade ambush on the British Museum with her British-Pakistani fiance Naweed Hussain, the court was told.
Safaa was just 16 when she met Hussain online in 2016. He romanced her with promises that they would wed and have children in Syria before detonating their suicide belts together to ‘depart the world holding hands, and taking others with them in an act of terrorism’, the Old Bailey heard.
They allegedly plotted to slay random members of the public at the museum armed with five Russian Tokarev pistols and grenades codenamed ‘pineapples’.
Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson QC told jurors that Safaa planned to ‘unleash violence and terror in the heart of London’.
He said: ‘She planned to launch an attack against members of the public, selected largely at random, in the environs of that cultural jewel and most popular of tourist attractions, the British Museum, in central London. This would have been an attack that would at the very least have caused widespread panic, but was intended to involve the infliction of serious injury and death.’
Hussain, 32, told Safaa all she needed was a ‘car and a knife to
‘Depart the world holding hands’
get what I want to achieve’, the court heard.
He was killed in Syria on April 4 last year and Safaa was charged days later with planning to travel to Syria to commit terror acts.
But she was so bent on causing carnage that she got her sister Rizlaine to ‘carry the torch forward in her stead’, the jury heard.
Mr Atkinson said: ‘Her determination was, if anything, strengthened after she learned that Naweed Hussain had been killed.
‘With positive encouragement from her mother and her sister Rizlaine, Safaa wanted to be reunited with her fiance in paradise by becoming a martyr.’
Using ‘Mad Hatter’s tea party’ as code for a second plot, the family were recorded talking to Safaa in prison on the phone about a knife attack on the Palace of Westminster which they hoped to carry out on April 27 last year, it is claimed.
Her sister and mother allegedly carried out reconnaissance in the Westminster area days before the attack, and bought a knife with a six-inch blade on April 26.
But on the day they planned to carry out their ‘suicide mission’, Rizlaine and her mother were arrested. The pair pleaded guilty to preparing acts of terrorism at a previous hearing at the Old Bailey, the jury was told.
The women were secretly recorded plotting an atrocity just days after Khalid Masood stabbed a police officer to death and ran over tourists on Westminster Bridge on March 22, the court heard.
Safaa joked about laying flowers at the scene of the attack and told her mother she had a ‘beautiful’ dream about being a martyr and ‘running out of ammunition’, it
was said. Earlier the court heard that she persuaded her older sister, who was a young mother with an eight-month-old baby, to go to Syria with her in August 2016 after Hussain sent £ 3,000 for their journey.
But the sisters were found shortly after they ran away with the child. Rizlaine had also previously tried to get to Syria in 2014, but was stopped by Turkish police and sent back to the UK.
Jurors heard that through a secret phone which Safaa hid in a cushion, she had established a network of 300 to 400 Islamic State ‘friends’ on encrypted mobile messaging app Telegram after first making contact with a female recruiter via Twitter in 2016.
Officers also found a cache of IS propaganda, including an image entitled ‘sisterhood in jihad’ of women being ‘martyred together’.
Joel Bennathan QC, defending, told the court: ‘Safaa Boular was groomed when she was a child. She was sexually groomed, someone who was groomed to be radicalised.’
Safaa showed no emotion as the trial began yesterday, occasionally flicking her hair behind her ears during the hearing. She denies two charges of preparing acts of terrorism. The trial continues.