Free Republic

The wife of the extremist who led the plot to kill hundreds of jet passengers prayed he would achieve the highest level of Islamic martyrdom, a court heard today. Cossor Ali, 28, wrote in her diary how she was desperate for Abdullah Ahmed Ali to kill himself for his cause, it is alleged. She even wrote of her hopes to be pregnant with a son by the time her husband was dead, jurors heard. 'I am growing more and more attached to the cause for which you are striving for, and the reason for which we are apart,' she wrote....

September 7, 2009 Mass murder at 30,000 feet: Islamic extremists guilty of airline bomb plot Philippe Naughton Three British Muslims were found guilty today of conspiracy to murder thousands of passengers and crew in an unprecedented airline bomb plot that could have proved as deadly as the 9/11 attacks. After a retrial at Woolwich Crown Court, jurors found the ringleader, Abdulla Ahmed, and two other men, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain, guilty of plotting to use liquid bombs to blow up airliners en route from Heathrow to the United States. Another defendant, Umar Islam, was found guilty of a more...

(Excerpted) LIQUID explosives ... are not difficult to obtain or make from raw ingredients could have been involved in the terror plot. One candidate, nitromethane, is used to fuel model aeroplane engines as well as being an explosive and an industrial solvent. Dr Sidney Alford, an explosives technician, said it was quite easy to get hold of in fairly small quantities, but it would have to be combined with a "sensitising" substance to make a bomb. An alternative, nitroethane, was less well known but just as effective, and there were fewer restrictions on obtaining and transporting it, he said. Another...