Jihadi teen plotted 9/11 bomb attack at Elton John concert

A TEENAGER planned a nail bomb attack at an Elton John concert on the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities.

Haroon Syed, 19, plotted to strike at ‘packed places in London’.

Targets included Buckingham Palace, busy shopping streets and the 50,000–strong crowd at Hyde Park for John’s gig on the 15th anniversary of the Twin Towers attack.

The IT student, who chose ‘IS’ as his phone password, yesterday admitted planning an attack on the scale of the London bombings on July 7, 2005 and now faces a possible life sentence.

It comes after his elder brother Nadir, 24, was jailed last year for plotting to carry out a Lee Rigbystyle beheading of a poppy seller before the run-up to Remembrance Sunday in 2014. His younger sibling, who was addicted to violent video games, was ‘desperate’ to carry out his own atrocity which he hoped would be ‘on the scale of 7/7’, the Old Bailey heard.

Syed attempted to source machine guns, pistols, suicide vests and bombs, and spoke of attacking shoppers in London’s Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circus.

But his plot was foiled after banks refused to lend him any cash, forcing him to seek help from an undercover officer posing as an extremist, who met him at a Costa Coffee in Slough, Berkshire.

Thomas Halpin, prosecuting, said Syed – a former follower of jailed hate preacher Anjem Choudary – was a young man ‘apparently desperate to carry out a terrorist attack in the UK’. The court heard that he was ‘the product of a dysfunctional and pathological upbringing’, which left him an ‘easy target for recruitment’ by radicals.

Lawyers claimed that his bomb plot was a fantasy that was ‘indistinguishable from the video games he was playing at the same time’. Syed will be sentenced on June 8.