From privileged life to plan of suicide attack

A former public schoolboy who plotted to blow himself up using his own suicide vest and homemade explosives has been sentenced to be detained in prison indefinitely.

Isa Ibrahim, 20, was in the "advanced" stages of planning an attack on a shopping centre before a tip-off from the Muslim community prompted armed police to storm his Bristol flat.

There they found he had made the highly explosive HMTD and had started work on a suicide vest.

The night before his arrest, in April last year, he had gone to his father's house to get ball bearings to use as shrapnel.

Winchester Crown Court heard the hospital consultant's son wanted to blow up the Broadmead Shopping Centre in Bristol, potentially inflicting massive casualties.

CCTV footage showed him doing a reconnaissance to find the best place to set the bomb off.

But after boasting to friends at a mosque that he had injured himself during a test of the explosive, as well as making radical remarks justifying the 9/11 attacks, someone in the Muslim community called police.

The jury convicted the heroin addict, who had been expelled from several schools, of making an explosive with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury to property in the UK in April last year.

He was also found guilty of a charge of preparing terrorist acts by purchasing material to make an explosive, making that explosive, buying material to detonate the explosive, carrying out "reconnaissance" before the act and "making an improvised suicide vest in which to then detonate an explosive substance".

Ibrahim was given an indeterminate sentence and told by the judge, Mr Justice Butterfield, he should serve a minimum of 10 years.

His mother fled the court in tears as the sentence was passed.

"You were, in my judgment, a lonely and angry young person, with a craving for attention," said Justice Butterfield.

"You are a dangerous young man, well capable of acting on the views you held," he added.

The jury heard that Ibrahim became increasingly radicalised after converting to Islam and changing his name from Andrew Philip Michael Ibrahim.

He spent months researching Islamic fundamentalism on the internet, as well as using it to find instructions on how to make explosives from household products.

The jury was told he had described Britain as a "dirty toilet" and he believed the 9/11 attacks were a justifiable act.

But Ibrahim told the jury he just wanted to set the vest off and film it for the website You Tube and that he thought suicide bombing was wrong.

He claimed he got involved in making explosives to be controversial and to fill a void in his life because he was lonely and felt he was the lost sheep of his family.

His defence counsel, David Spens QC, said Ibrahim's unhealthy interest in explosives started at an early age but he had no intention of blowing anyone up.

Justice Butterfield said he considered Ibrahim to be a "continuing danger" to the public, but gave a substantial discount on the minimum term imposed due to his age and the fact he had acted alone.

Flanked by four prison officers, Ibrahim showed no emotion as the jury delivered its majority verdict.

- INDEPENDENT