Two terrorists, Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein, were found guilty of plotting attacks on Jewish communities. Photo / Greater Manchester Police
Two Islamic State-inspired terrorists were found guilty of plotting “the worst terrorist act in British history” on Jewish communities after being caught by an undercover sting.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, from Wigan, and Amar Hussein, 52, from Bolton, wanted to replicate the 2015 Paris terror attacks in revenge for Israeli assaults on Gaza, a court heard.
The pair bought assault rifles, handguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in preparation for a marauding suicide gun attack in which they wanted to “kill as many members of the Jewish community as they could” and hoped to become “martyrs”.
Prestwich in Greater Manchester, less than two miles away from the Heaton Park synagogue where Jihad al-Shamie carried out an attack in October, was earmarked as a potential target.
Saadaoui told an undercover officer how “Prestwich is full of Jews” and scouted out synagogues, Jewish schools and a Kosher supermarket. He also considered carrying out an attack during protests against anti-Semitism.
The pair were found guilty at Preston Crown Court of preparing acts of terrorism, with their main targets being the Jewish community in the north-west of England, members of law enforcement and the military.
Saadaoui’s brother Bilel, 36, from Wigan, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism.
Mark Gardner, the chief executive of the Community Security Trust, said the plot could have been “the worst terrorist act in British history”.
“To hear now that somebody was trying to obtain weapons and had put together a meticulous attack plan to go and kill as many Jews as possible, to hear that I think will make people very, very fearful,” he said.
Chief Constable Stephen Watson, of Greater Manchester Police, said: “It was clear throughout this trial that the scale of the offender’s hatred towards our Jewish community knew no bounds.
“It may well have been the worst terrorist act in British history.”
“They sought to bring slaughter to the innocent, but the outstanding dedication and commitment of our people ensured that this – unequivocally – could not happen.”
The three-month trial heard that Saadaoui had stalked Jewish Facebook groups looking for targets and paid £4400 ($10,175) as an initial payment for four AK-47 assault rifles, two handguns and 1200 rounds of ammunition as he planned the attack with Hussein, a former Iraqi soldier who worked at an appliance shop in Bolton.
Saadaoui was caught “red-handed” by police in the car park of a Lancashire hotel as he took delivery of the weapons from the boot of a rented Lexus following an undercover operation.
Police body-worn footage showed him running about 18m before he was grabbed by armed officers and brought to the ground in May last year.
Saadaoui, a former hotel entertainer originally from Tunisia, married an English woman and moved to Britain in 2012, where he worked in the shop at the Haven Holiday Park in Great Yarmouth.
He bought the Albatross Italian Restaurant for £25,000 ($58,000) in April 2018 but closed the business four years later, sold his house for £169,000 ($391,000) in May 2023, and moved to Wigan with his second wife and two young children.
Harpreet Sandhu KC, prosecuting, told the court that after his move to Wigan “his focus was on planning his terrorist attacks”.
Sandhu said Saadaoui was “desperate to get his hands on firearms” and “intended to cause a colossal loss of human life through the terrorist attack he planned”.
Saadaoui began posting material on Facebook supporting Islamic State (IS) towards the end of 2022, using a series of 10 different accounts under false names, several using a picture of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the Paris attacks which left 130 people dead.
In February 2023, Saadaoui posted an IS-inspired video encouraging “lone wolf” attacks, saying: “Avenge your religion, oh Muslims in Europe”.
That summer, he started emptying his bank accounts, withdrawing £88,500 ($205,000) in cash and he was put under surveillance after a series of disturbing posts appeared on social media, including one which read: “I pray to you not to catch me until I break my thirst with Jews, Christians and their proxies’ blood”.
On December 13, 2023, an undercover officer called Farouk, who was using the name Abu Bilal, sent a friend request to Saadaoui pretending to live in Brussels near the former home of Abaaoud.
Saadaoui responded: “May God preserve you. You need to do what he had done, make him a role model and carry out operations against the Jews and the Crusaders there, and hitting them there affects them badly”.
Saadaoui told him he had a “trustworthy” brother he had asked to join him in launching an attack a few months earlier. The court heard how he used one of his Facebook accounts in the name of Will Alba to join the Manchester Jewish Community’s group page on December 22.
He told the group’s administrator he had been a member of a synagogue in Croydon, south London, and had recently moved to Manchester.
In conversations with the undercover officer, Saadaoui told Farouk he wanted to “kill as many as possible”, and in a voice note on Christmas Day 2023 added: “These matters of running someone over with a car or using a knife is ineffective, what is needed is an automatic gun.
“We want to do the same as what Abaaoud done, God willing. We must run rivers of their impure blood.”
The two men spoke for the first time in a phone call on January 14, 2024 and Farouk told Saadaoui that “brothers” in Morocco could supply them with Kalashnikov assault rifles, the same type of weapons used in Paris.
Saadaoui suggested using “the inflated boats – what we call the death boats” to import the weapons and said he needed four automatic weapons, as one firearm “would not do the job, it wouldn’t be enough, not enough for us”.
Three days later, he explained he needed to “get things in order” and “to pay farewell to my family”.
He advised Farouk to keep physically healthy as “there will be a lot of hit and run”. He said he had tried alternative ways to source weapons including “people in Albania” but “they had become suspicious of me doing something”.
In February 2024, Saadaoui met Farouk in Queen’s Park in Bolton to discuss their plans to smuggle weapons into the country disguised as car parts.
Farouk, who was now pretending to live in Portugal, brought oranges as a present and Saadaoui spoke about targeting an area with a large Jewish population, promising: “I will take you to an area in north Manchester called Prestwich. That Prestwich is full of Jews”.
Saadaoui said he had been “planning to carry out an operation using a knife” but he wanted to kill at least 50 people, adding: “Grab a Jewish person and slaughter him and remove his head, rub blood on my body, throw it away. That is the least we can do”.
Saadaoui handed €4300 ($8,680) to Farouk during a meeting in Firs Park, Leigh, on March 15 and told him he was considering disguising himself in Jewish clothing for the attack.
“We wait until they do a protest about hatred of the Jews, you know. When they do that it is a beautiful, beautiful, very beautiful time,” he added.
On March 16, Farouk picked up Saadaoui from his home at 12.45am and went on to collect Hussein. They drove to Dover in a rented VW T-Roc where they posed as tourists at the White Cliffs National Trust nature reserve.
On the journey, Saadaoui was recorded saying: “The Muslims all over the world, if every brother implements on the Jewish people, honestly they wouldn’t do what they do in Gaza now”.
The following morning Saadaoui arranged to meet Farouk at Pennington Waterside and Marina in Leigh and told the officer: “I swear I was happy yesterday. Perhaps it was the best day in my life”.
They travelled to Prestwich and Higher Broughton and walked past Jewish nurseries, schools, restaurants, coffee shops and synagogues, even entering a Kosher supermarket.
While talking over the plan Saadaoui called Jewish people “pigs and monkeys”, adding: “Hitler, may God be exalted, was burning them, the Jews. Did you know?”.
He added: “Imagine yourself amongst them and you are wearing a rucksack and then you start. They wouldn’t have anywhere to escape”.
The undercover officer rented a safe house in Bolton, where they planned to store the weapons and prepare for the attack.
On the way to the house on April 30, Farouk told Saadaoui that it was not too late to change his mind, but Saadaoui insisted that he had made “preparations” by emptying his bank accounts and putting the deeds for his house in his wife and children’s names.
“My wish is martyrdom in the cause of Allah, the best thing I like is martyrdom in the cause of Allah,” he added.
As they drove away, Saadaoui told Farouk: “We pledge allegiance to death”.
He added: “The schools I showed you, their gathering. We open fire on them, young, old, women, elderly, the whole lot, killing them all. Killing them all”.
On the afternoon of May 7, Saadaoui met Hussein and they drove to Dover in Hussein’s grey Ford C-Max where they booked into a Premier Inn across the road from the harbour.
The next day they arrived at the National Trust car park at White Cliffs where Hussein used a pair of binoculars to monitor the traffic arriving at the port before driving back to the North West three hours later.
Saadaoui then drove his black Peugeot 308 to the carpark of the Last Drop Village Hotel in Bolton to take delivery of the weapons from Farouk, who arrived in a Lexus with French registration plates. The firearms were deactivated weapons that had been placed in Farouk’s car a few hours earlier.
After Saadaoui was arrested, a three-day search of his home uncovered £74,000 ($149,450) hidden in a safe buried in the floor of an outhouse.
In court, Saadaoui claimed he was being threatened by a “high-ranking” member of IS he had met at a mosque in Norwich, who said he would return to Britain and “cut my head off” if he did not send money, post extremist comments online and help plan the attack.
He admitted sending £20,000 ($40,390) to a man called Hamdi al-Masalkhi, who had left Cardiff for Syria in July 2013.
However, police discovered that al-Masalkhi had died from cancer in Turkey in February 2021.
Hussein was arrested at Salim Appliances in Bolton and police found two knives under the front seat of his car.
On the first day of his trial, he shouted from the dock: “Don’t talk s***. How many babies? How many children? Don’t talk s***. We defend ourselves”.
He refused to turn up for the rest of his trial but denied any involvement in the plot.
Asked if he was a supporter of IS, Hussein said: “Yes. They are Muslim, that’s it. They make Sharia. They are real Muslims. Islamic law for everything”.
Rob Potts, assistant chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, said the plans the pair were making would have resulted in “one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in UK history”.
He described the plot as “devilish”, calling Saadaoui an “extremely dangerous man” and Hussein a “fanatical terrorist who is very, very entrenched and unrepentant in his views and his ideology and mindset”.
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