£800k legal aid for Islamist terrorists in city bomb plot Solicitor claims ‘jury got it wrong’ and likens case to Birmingham Six
ABIRMINGHAM terror gang jailed for life over a foiled Isis-inspired bomb and knife plot has received nearly £800,000 in legal aid, figures reveal.
Khobaib Hussain, 25, Naweed Ali, 30, both of Sparkhill, Birmingham, together with Mohibur Rahman, 33, and Tahir Aziz, 38, both of Stoke-on-Trent, were awarded the funds to pay for solicitors, barristers and QCs.
Their lawyers even accused counter terror officers of planting a bag of weapons, including a pipe bomb and meat cleaver, throughout a four-and-a-half month trial at the Old Bailey.
But a jury rejected the claims, taking 22 hours to unanimously convict the men – who called themselves the “Three Musketeers” in encrypted group chats – of preparing terrorist acts.
They were described as “dangerous men” who were committed to carrying out a “mass casualty attack”.
Now figures obtained by the Press Association under freedom of information laws have revealed the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) has paid a staggering total of £790,485 in lawyers’ fees and other payments, known as disbursements, to fund their failed defence.
The billing process is not yet complete, with the final figure likely to rise.
Some £635,822 went to trial advocates alone, with each of the defendants represented by a QC and junior barrister in court.
Ali and Hussain were represent- ed by solicitor Gareth Peirce, who was played by Emma Thompson in the 1993 film In The Name Of The Father about her work with Gerry Conlon – one of the Guildford Four wrongly convicted of being a Provisional IRA bomber.
Ms Peirce expressed “profound concern that the jury in this case has got it wrong” after Ali and Hussain were sentenced in August, comparing the case to the Birmingham Six, the men wrongly jailed for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.
The pair’s bill for trial solicitors is still “pending authorisation” by the LAA and is not included in the figures, which reveal solicitors acting for Rahman and Aziz were given £129,088 in legal aid payments for their work during the trial.
The figures also show solicitors received a total £15,974 in legal aid payments to represent gang members at the police station, while total disbursements came in at £9,598 for the four defendants.
In a response for a request for information, a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) spokesman said fees paid are automatically calculated through an IT system based on a fixed set of parameters, including the serious- ness of offence, the size of the bundle of prosecution evidence, the number of defendants per litigator, the number of days in court and the number of witnesses.
He added: “Anyone facing a crown court trial is eligible for legal aid, subject to a strict means test. Applicants who meet the relevant means thresholds may still be required to pay a significant contribution towards the costs of their defence.”
Ali, Rahman and Hussain were jailed for a minimum of 20 years in August, while Aziz was handed a 15-year minimum term after they were found guilty of plotting to strike police and military targets on British soil last summer.
They had claimed a partially constructed pipe bomb and a meat cleaver found hidden in a JD Sports bag in Ali’s car off Holloway Head in Birmingham city centre was planted by an undercover police officer known as Vincent.
Sentencing the gang, from the West Midlands, Mr Justice Globe said defence lawyers had conducted “a root and branch attack on the credibility of just about every prosecution witness in the case, most particularly the undercover officer known as Vincent, who alone was cross-examined for a total of 12 days, but more generally upon the integrity of the whole of the Counter Terrorism Unit of the West Midlands Police.”
“It was an attack which the verdicts of the jury suggest was wholly unfounded,” he said.
The judge highlighted the four separate terror attacks carried out in Britain during the trial, adding: “I am satisfied from the evidence and the jury verdicts, but for the intervention of the Counter Terrorism Unit of West Midlands Police and the security services, there would have been not-dissimilar terrorist acts in this country using at the very least the explosives and or one or more bladed weapons.”
Anyone facing a crown court trial is eligible for legal aid, subject to a strict means test Ministry of Justice