The Al Qaeda Factor: Plots Against the West

Chapter 5: Operation Rhyme (London, 2004)

C h a p t e r 5 Operation Rhyme (London, 2004) on august 3, 2004, British authorities arrested a group of fourteen men in the Luton area north of London. Two weeks later on August 17, 2004, eight of the men were charged with conspiracy to murder; conspiracy to commit a public nuisance by the use of radioactive materials, toxic gases, chemicals, and/or explosives; and possessing a document or record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism . The group, which was called the “Luton Cell,” had no funding, vehicles, or bomb-making equipment, but the incriminating documents included reconnaissance plans, two notebooks containing information on explosives, poisons, chemicals, and related matters, and an extract of The Terrorist’s Handbook, all classed as “information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” under the U.K.’s Terrorism Act.20 The four primary plans that the group seems to have considered are the following: · Attacking several key financial institutions in the United States: the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington , D.C., the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup buildings in New York City, and the Prudential building in Newark, New Jersey. · Packing three stretch limousines with commercially available gas canisters and parking them in hotel underground garages (where a truck bomb would not fit) to inflict mass damage and chaos. Operation Rhyme (London, 2004) 69 · Building a dirty bomb using ten thousand smoke detectors either set on fire or placed on top of an explosive device. · Blowing up trains under the Thames using set timed explosives on the London Underground in order to cause the river to flood the lines. Londonistan Chapter 2 provides an outline of the origins and the development of the rejectionist Islamic environment in Britain. As noted there, one of the “scenes” that developed in Britain was known as “Londonistan,” dominated by Algerian veterans of the Algerian civil war, which had begun in 1992. Abu Qatada, a Jordanian cleric linked to al Qaeda, and his student, Abu Hamza al Masri, were the key ideologues, dominating this scene and promoting al Qaeda ideology. Both had bona fides in the larger British Islamist rejectionist community: Abu Qatada sat on al Qaeda’s religious rulings committee and Abu Hamza had been injured in the Darunta al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where he lost an eye and had a hand replaced by a hook. He had then traveled to Bosnia in the mid 1990’s to support the mujahedeen. Because of Abu Hamza’s status as a “veteran” of two jihads, he had celebrity status in the community and young men flocked to hear his speeches.2 Abu Hamza utilized the Finsbury Park Mosque as a high-profile center of operation from which he could proliferate his message of support for “jihad ” abroad including Bosnia, Chechnya, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and especially Kashmir.3 Most of the active and passive core of plotters (Dhiren Barot, Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, Abdul Aziz Jalil, Omar Abdul Rehman, Junade Feroze, Zia Ul Haq, Qaisar Shaffi, and Nadeem Tarmohammed) emerged from overlapping networks of men in and around the Luton area who attended prayer meetings at a variety of locations including Willesden Library, run by the radical cleric Abdullah al Faisal, and at Finsbury Park Mosque, run by Abu Hamza al Masri.4 Gravitating to Reactionary Islam Soon after Dhiren Barot converted to Islam, in 1991–92 he began attending local prayer meetings at Willesden Library and at the Finsbury Park 70 Al Qaeda“Suggested/Endorsed”Plots Mosque. After attending a lecture by Abu Hamza, where he was told of the mujahedeen and the concept of jihad, Barot began to frequently discuss how to help “oppressed” Islamic people abroad.5 In September 1995, Dhiren Barot told his Air Malta coworkers he was leaving for a trip overseas. He quit his job and traveled to Pakistan that October with a friend known only by the initials “F.C.”6 Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory describe the pathway of a typical young member of the local Islamist scene who attended Finsbury Park and then subsequently joined the Kashmiri jihad: Some who ended up at Finsbury Park had previously dabbled with different groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir . . . and Lashkar-e-Tayyba. Most novices were like Abdullah, possessed of a burning desire...