Jailed for life, the St Paul’s plotter who wanted to be UK’s f irst female suicide bomber
A MUSLIM convert who wanted to become Britain’s first female suicide bomber by blowing up St Paul’s Cathedral was jailed for life yesterday.
Safiyya Shaikh, 37, told undercover police she wanted to ‘do a piece of history and kill as many kuffar [nonMuslims] as possible’ in a day of carnage across London.
The jobless single mother also urged others to carry out mass murder on a secret jihadist chat channel.
She was caught after she handed two pink bags to a man she thought was a fellow jihadist who would rig them with explosives. However he was part of a police sting operation.
Shaikh, who was born as Michelle Ramsden in Hounslow, west London, intended to blow herself up on the London Underground and had gone through the early stages of being fitted for a suicide vest.
Mr Justice Sweeney sentenced her to life with a minimum term of 14 years at the Old Bailey yesterday. As she was taken to the cells wearing a black hijab, Shaikh smiled and raised her finger in a salute associated with Islamic State, the barbaric terror group to which she had pledged allegiance.
The judge said: ‘I have asked myself whether life is required, and in my view, self-evidently it is, not least because it is impossible to predict whether you will be safe at the end of a determinate sentence.’
The court heard that Shaikh plotted to plant the ‘girly’ pink bags containing bombs at St Paul’s Cathedral and at the fourstar Great St Helen Hotel near the Gherkin tower.
She then planned to board a packed Tube train wearing a suicide vest and detonate all the bombs, causing mass casualties during Christmas or Easter.
Her plans were thwarted when she began confiding in an associate on a secret messaging app in August last year, unaware that he was an undercover officer. Police believed her intentions were serious and MI5 made her a ‘subject of interest’.
In her conversations with the officer she described her plot as the ‘best opportunity of my life’, adding: ‘I always knows [sic] I wanted to do something big. Killing one kuffar is not enough.’
Shaikh shared images of Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding at St Paul’s and wrote: ‘If I had choice I blow [sic] the church to ground. With kuffar in it.
‘I want start planning. I am serious about this. I want action and revenge deep from my heart.’ She carried out a reconnaissance mission on September 8, visiting the cathedral to fine tune her plan. Shaikh sent photos to the officer, saying: ‘I would love to destroy that place. Under this dome I would like put a bomb.’
On September 24 last year, she
‘Killing one kuffar is not enough’
met the associate’s ‘wife’ – also an undercover officer – in uxbridge, north-west London, to hand over her bags.
She was due to meet the woman again but called the meeting off, causing police to storm her home in Hayes, west London, and arrest her on October 10.
Shaikh’s barrister, Ben Newton, argued that his client cancelled the meeting because she had ‘cold feet’ and would never have gone through with the plot.
But moments before the judge was due to sentence her, prosecutors disclosed details of a phone call Shaikh had made from prison in which she told a friend: ‘I didn’t get cold feet, yeah – I was ready to go through with it. I was not having doubts. The reason why I did not turn up on the day is I was doing drugs.’
Shaikh, a benefits claimant and heroin addict, had admitted preparing terrorist acts and disseminating terrorist publications back in February.
She converted to Islam in 2007 after being impressed by the kindness of Muslim neighbours.
But she became disillusioned by what she saw as the moderate version of Islam preached in mosques and started to follow and talk to extremists online in 2015. She was radicalised by watching online videos of hate preacher Anjem Choudary and clips of his acolytes on YouTube.
In 2016 she stopped attending mosques because she knew the imams and other worshippers did not approve of her extremist views. She was referred to the Government’s anti-extremism programme Prevent three times
‘I want action and revenge’
between August 2016 and September 2017.
Officers made ‘numerous attempts’ to engage with her but she was not responsive.
Shaikh wept in court as her defence counsel described her ‘life of pain and loneliness’ and disclosed that she suffered a ‘truly traumatic childhood’.
She started taking drugs after suffering abuse as a teenager, and became a single mother at a young age. She was cautioned over the possession of a Class B drug in 2001 when she was 18.
In 2013 she was cautioned for theft and given a community order for burglary. Two years later she was arrested for heroin possession. The court heard that Shaikh could not be interviewed by police when she was first arrested because she was on a heroin comedown.
Commander Richard Smith, head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit, said: ‘Safiyya Shaikh was clearly dangerous, she was spreading vile directives for mass murder across the world and also planning her own horrific terrorist attack on uK soil.’