‘Isil supporters planned terrorist attack using driverless car to spare their own lives’

‘My only attempt is to find a way to carry out martyrdom operation with cars without driver’

A DRIVERLESS car terror attack which two suspects planned because they wanted to spare their own lives was foiled when police raided a home and found ingredients for a bomb, a court heard yesterday.

Andy Star, 32, who lived and worked at the Mermaid Fish Bar on Sheffield Road, Chesterfield, and Farhad Salah worked together to make the weapon, Sheffield Crown Court was told.

On Tuesday, prosecutor Anne Whyte QC told the court how the pair were supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), and how Salah had arrived in the UK in 2014.

She said: “The prosecution allege that Farhad Salah and Andy Star had decided that improvised explosive devices could be made and used in a way here in the UK that spared their own lives preferably, but harmed others they considered to be infidels.”

During her opening speech, Ms Whyte read a message, sent by 23-yearold Salah in December 2017, in which he told a contact: “My only attempt is to find a way to carry out martyrdom operation with cars without driver, everything is perfect only the programme is left.”

Describing how this was evidence Salah was “attack planning”, Ms Whyte added: “But he was not planning alone. Andy Star had access to the materials necessary to conduct small test runs with explosives and Star was making those devices in his flat.”

The court also heard the ideology of Salah, of Brunswick Road, Sheffield, was evident in his social-media messages, with Ms Whyte telling how his communications reflected “his affiliation to Islamic State”.

On November 29 last year he is said to have shared a 58-minute propaganda video “designed to inspire supporters of IS but also designed to frighten those who do not support IS”, which showed scenes of warfare, beheadings and executions.

After the pair were arrested on December 19 last year, three air rifles, two Samurai swords, a wine bottle full of sulphuric acid, homemade fireworks, and “a variety of improvised homemade fuses” were discovered at Star’s property, Ms Whyte said.

The court heard how officers investigating Salah’s home discovered gunpowder and a “viable pyrotechnic fuse”.

The pair deny preparing an act of terrorism, and their trial is expected to last four weeks.