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LONDON - A judge has jailed four men for 40 years each for attempting to carry out suicide bombings on London's transport system in a plot he said had clearly been masterminded by al Qaeda.
Judge Adrian Fulford told the four he had no doubt their botched attempt
to bomb three underground trains and a bus on July 21, 2005, two weeks after 52 people were killed in similar attacks, had been directed by Osama bin Laden's group.
The second wave of attacks only failed because, although the detonators fired, the bombs did not explode.
"This was a viable, indeed a very nearly successful, attempt at mass murder," Fulford told the court on Wednesday local time.
"These were not truly isolated events but ... coordinated and connected in that I have no doubt they were part of an al Qaeda inspired and controlled sequence of attacks."
The men, Muktah Said Ibrahim, Yassin Hassan Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Hussein Osman, all Muslims of African origin, were found guilty on Monday of conspiracy to murder.
Sentencing them, Fulford ruled they should stay in jail for a minimum of 40 years, the maximum sentence he said he could impose in light of other terrorism cases.
The men looked impassive as the sentences were handed down. As they left the courtroom, Osman clutched a Koran to his chest.
Earlier, two other suspects on whom the jury failed to reach verdicts, were told they would face a retrial.
The failed attacks occurred as Britain was reeling from the suicide bombings on July 7, the most deadly peacetime attack on London, carried out by four young British Islamists.
"At least 50 people would have died, hundreds would have been wounded, thousands would have had their lives permanently damaged, disfigured or otherwise," Fulford said.
"The family and friends of the dead and the injured, the hundreds, indeed thousands, captured underground in terrifying circumstances -- the smoke, the screams of the wounded and the dying -- this each defendant knew."
Police and security services have said there is no firm evidence the two attacks in London were linked. But Fulford said he believed they had been masterminded by al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Last weekend, two car bombs were found in London and a fuel-packed jeep was rammed into Glasgow Airport in failed attacks that Prime Minister Gordon Brown linked to al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, on Tuesday threatened more attacks on Britain following its decision to grant a high state award to author Salman Rushdie.
Ibrahim, the July 21 group's ringleader, had travelled to Pakistan in December 2004 to learn bombmaking skills at the same time two of the July 7 bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were there.
During the trial, the court heard the three had met there.
"It seems to me ... their preparations were organised as part of parallel but separate teams as individual terrorist cells on July 7 and July 21," Fulford said.
All the men, who had come to Britain as refugees to escape war in their homelands, had claimed that the bombings were a hoax designed as a protest against the Iraq war.
But Fulford said this was a "cynical ploy".
Arthur Burton-Garbett, 72, who chased Mohammed through an underground station after his failed attempt to bomb a train, said the 40-year sentence was "not a day too long".
"If I could have gone for an execution (verdict), I would have," he told reporters at the court.
- REUTERS
