British soldier’s son jailed for plotting terror attack
A STUDENT from a British Army family plotted a terror attack in the UK after his jihadi brother carried out a suicide bombing in Syria.
Mohammed Abbas Idris Awan, 24, who was “radicalised” by his brother, was caught by police in June after purchasing 500 ball bearings online.
Detectives found a “significant volume” of extremist material, including advice on how to be a “sleeper cell” in the West. It included material from his brother “which celebrated brutal and depraved acts of terror such as beheadings, burning of people alive and the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris in 2015”.
Rizwan Awan, 27, his brother, killed 30 people in a bomb blast in Iraq in 2016. Their parents were described as “dignified pillars of the community”. His father, Mohammed Idrees, had served in the Army and later worked as a bus driver for decades.
Sheffield Crown Court heard how Awan, who was in the fourth year of a dentistry course at Sheffield University, “adopted an outwardly innocent and respectable persona with the clear intention” to “perpetrate a terrorist act without being detected”.
Police seized 11 mobile phones, 16 memory sticks and seven computers in raids at addresses in Sheffield, where he was studying, and at his family home in Huddersfield, West Yorks.
A jury found him guilty of three terror charges following a three-week trial. Sentencing him to 10 years in prison, Judge Paul Watson QC said Awan was no “Walter Mitty fantasist”.