I.S. plotter jailed over pressure cooker bomb

AN ISIS fanatic who tried to make a pressure cooker bomb using fairy lights has been jailed for life.

Zahid Hussain, 29, was planning to target railway lines after viewing hundreds of the terror group’s images of the war in Syria.

Hussain used a bedroom at his parents’ home in Alum Rock, Birmingham, to research and try to assemble explosives. The former doorman tried to create a remotecontrol detonator using a wireless doorbell and had successfully made four igniters from fairy lights.

Winchester crown court heard he wrongly believed his pressure cooker bomb – packed with 1.6kg of shrapnel – was viable. After his arrest in August 2015, it emerged he had carried out reconnaissance of the main London rail line.

Books on guerrilla warfare were discovered, including one that talked of strikes on railways.

Sentencing Hussain to life with a minimum 15 years, Mr Justice Sweeney said: “You were clearly deeply radicalised and were strongly committed to what you were doing.” He added that had his device been viable, it would have been capable of causing a “significant explosion”.

The High Court judge acknowledged that Hussain suffers from paranoid schizophrenia but said his offending “was only partly attributable to that disorder”, finding that the driving factor had been his “voluntary bedroom radicalisation”.

DEVICE Hussain