British students jailed over al Qaeda propaganda

By Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) - A British court on Thursday jailed a group of British Muslim students who collected a library of al Qaeda propaganda and intended to travel to Afghanistan to fight coalition forces for a total of 13 years.

The five Muslim men linked up with sympathizers in Pakistan and the United States and held video conferences over the Internet to discuss violent jihad. They were caught after the parents of one of the students contacted police.

Schoolboy Irfan Raja had run away from home in February 2006 when he was just 17, leaving a suicide note.

"If not in this dunyad (world) we will meet in Jannat (paradise)," the note said.

When his parents looked on his computer they found speeches by Osama bin Laden calling for Muslims to take revenge on the West for invading Islamic lands and other extremist speeches, the prosecution told a London court.

"Any disbeliever, Jews and Americans were the prime targets," said prosecutor Antony Edis.

Raja had gone to meet four students from Bradford University in the north of England whom he had befriended on the Internet and who intended to go to training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

However the next day, he returned home after speaking to his parents by phone and was arrested.

"They (Raja's parents) are orthodox Muslims and do not subscribe to this extremist or radical strain of thought," Edis said.

Detectives uncovered a wealth of material on the men's computers. These included Internet conversations justifying suicide bombings, the need for terrorism training and cover stories for traveling abroad.

Propaganda in the form of books, videos, songs and film clips were also found as well as extracts from the al Qaeda Training Manual, including diagrams of triggering devices and a list of the most popular types of explosive.

"Once they were fully trained they planned to cause as much havoc as they could," Edis said.

Raja, now 19, Aitzaz Zafar, 19, Usman Malik, 20, Akber Butt, 20, and Awaab Iqbal, 20, were all found guilty of possessing articles for terrorist purposes.

They received two to three year jail terms each.

"This was not an adolescent fantasy. It is clear that these men were intent on committing terrorism overseas," said Peter Clarke, head of Britain's Counter Terrorism Command.