Teenager’s bid to bomb Elton show on 9/11 anniversary
AN ISLAMIC State-obsessed teenager who plotted mass murder by detonating a nail bomb at an Elton John concert on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was yesterday jailed for life.
Haroon Syed, 19, planned to blow up the device in the ‘middle of a crowd’ to murder and maim.
The IT student’s ‘role model’ was older brother Nadir Syed, who was convicted in December 2015 for plotting to behead a poppy seller with a 12in knife on Remembrance Sunday 2014, and was jailed for life.
Syed’s ‘anger and frustration’ over his brother’s arrest led him to start preparing his own attack four months later when he was only 18, the Old Bailey was told.
He trawled the internet for targets, including the ‘most crowded place in London’, ‘packed places in London’, and ‘upcoming events in London’. They included Sir Elton’s concert, which attracted 50,000 fans in Hyde Park last year on the 15th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
He tried to buy a suicide belt, machine gun and pistol with bullets to carry out atrocities on targets including Buckingham Palace and Piccadilly Circus.
Fuelled by watching ‘graphic and extreme videos’ of IS terror attacks and indoctrination from members of hate preacher Anjem Choudhary’s extremist group al-Muhajiroun, Syed contacted a man he believed to be a potential accomplice on Threema, a secure internet messaging system.
But he was actually speaking online with an undercover MI5 agent posing as a radical.
Syed arranged a meeting with a man he thought was a bombmaker – but who was actually an undercover agent – at a Costa Coffee branch in Slough, Berkshire, where he handed him £150 to make the device and told him to include ‘lots of nails inside’.
‘The brothers must make this bomb really strong,’ Syed said. ‘It has to be powerful... to kill lots of kuffar [non-believers].’ He asked for it to have a button so he could detonate it remotely in a public place and save his own skin.
When counter-terror police raided Syed’s home in Hounslow, west London, on September 8 last year and asked if he had a password for his phone he replied: ‘Yeah, ISIS. You like that?’
While in jail on remand he drew a picture of a man being beheaded with a reference to Dawlah, another name for IS.
Syed, who had earlier pleaded guilty to preparing acts of terrorism during a five-month period between April and September last year, was yesterday jailed for a minimum of 16 and a half years.
Judge Michael Topolski, QC, told him he had wanted to be part of IS because ‘it made you feel like a man’. The judge added: ‘You were and you remained intent upon, and committed to, carrying out an act of mass murder in this country… You were not lured, you were not enticed, you were not entrapped. You remained deeply committed to the ideology of a brutal and barbaric organisation that has sought to hijack an ancient and venerable religion for its own purposes.’
Syed grew up with an absent mother and neglectful father, and his brother was his only parental role model, the court heard.
After his brother’s conviction, he contacted the undercover agent on April 13, asking him to make a ‘really strong’ pressure cooker bomb. When officers stormed his home, they found a ‘selfie’ of Syed with the black Islamic State flag and his left index finger pointing in the air, in a terrorist salute.
Syed claimed he was addicted to violent video games and had lost touch with reality when he plotted the attack, but this was rejected by the judge.
‘Intent upon act of mass murder’