UPDATE 17th Feb 2009 – Trial: ‘Airline Plotters planned carnage on unprecedented scale‘
RETRIAL FOR 7 TERROR SUSPECTS?
Read Sky News Report of retrial call here or read it all here on this page
- McCain’s belittling retort to Brown’s support of Obama – “The Coveted Gordon Brown endorsement” So that makes a few more million of us not too happy with Mr Brown
- Andy Hayman, Assistant Commissioner, Special Operations, MET says “Britain has no counter-terrorism structure. It’s a mess”!
- The Sun report on terror convictions
- This American writer asks if our standards on legal action are utterly inappropriate in this asymmetric warfare. “It is applying the requirements of justice to the necessities of defense. It is deploying a jury to do an army’s work.” Ah but Sir, Mr Blair tried explaining this to our civil liberty obsessed peoples. They (through their spokesmen, the papers) said, “get thee behind me Satan”. The rest is history. Like British justice.
Comment at end
10th September, 2008
SORT OF, KIND OF GUILTY-ISH – AN UNSATISFACTORY OUTCOME
Who picked or unpicked THAT JURY?
It may be politically incorrect to suggest that there may be a certain amount of jury selection going on in some of our courts today, but I’d like someone to tell me this:
How many original jurors did the defence barristers reject before this case got going? Was it 1 out of 12? Or 3? Or 6? Or 9?
I know the very thought of this kind of pre-emptive jury nobbling will be criticised by the PC brigade, and I have yet to find much reference to this online, even as general guidance. This book excerpt (1992 publication) says that there have been some cases where the defence lawyers wanted the ENTIRE JURY to be comprised ONLY of the same racial mix as the accused. Please reassure us that this did NOT happen in this case. This is VERY important.
We’ve had plenty of post-mortems on the verdicts in the terrorist case over the ‘open and shut case’ presented by the prosecution on the “airline bomb plotters”. There have been radio and TV documentaries, including Panorama. There have been noises of partial but incomplete satisfaction from the police and security services. There has been a statement from the Home Secretary saying that it was a good result.
And the man in charge of the investigation, Peter Clarke has polished up as shiny a gloss as possible on it all, whilst hinting what HE thought about their intentions towards seven American airlines departing from Heathrow.
I’m not a politician, so I’ll tell you what most of us ordinary Britons are thinking.
It was a disastrous outcome!
The only worse position would be that all eight could be walking freely amongst us now, laughing at the incompetence of this liberal land of walkover nincompoops.
The security services and courts here clearly couldn’t catch a half dead diptera if it was stuck inside the powerful jaws of a Venus flytrap!
So if it is the case that up to five of the eight accused have NOT been found guilty of major terror offences, whose fault is it?
- The Crown Prosecution Service for not being sufficiently armed with the evidence?
- The police & security services – ditto?
- The burden of proof hurdles?
- The court and judge for not directing the jury properly?
- The judge for emphasising too heavily the duty to prove “beyond reasonable doubt”?
- The Americans for arresting the mastermind contact in Pakistan and pushing the British to move before the word got back to the group on London?
- The British for listening to the Americans?
- The jury for being too soft on suspected terrorists?
No matter whose fault it was, or whichever combination of events contributed, we will have to wait to see if the CPS will think it worth their while and our money to try again. Or perhaps if the Americans propose to apply for their extradition?
SKY NEWS REPORT
Seven defendants in the liquid bomb case are to face a retrial, it has been announced.
The decision was made following a meeting by Crown Prosecution Service chiefs.
There was astonishment on Monday when jurors said they were not convinced of the existence of an Al Qaeda plot to blow up aircraft using hydrogen peroxide bombs disguised as soft drinks.
One Whitehall source described the outcome as “Britain’s OJ Simpson verdict – unexpected and unpredictable.”
Sky’s Mark White said: “Prosecutors were very shocked when that verdict came in. They thought this was the strongest terrorist case they had ever brought to trial.
“They have decided that they want to go ahead with a retrial of the seven men on charges of conspiracy to murder on board aircraft.”
Of the eight people on trial, three were found guilty of one of the charges against them, four had no verdict given, and one was cleared.
Abdullah Ali, the alleged ringleader, was found guilty of conspiracy to murder, along with Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27.
The trio admitted plotting to set off a series of relatively small bombs at targets across the country.
Prosecutors said they had considered gas terminals, oil refineries, Canary Wharf, various airports, the electricity grid and internet providers as targets.
Crucially, however, the jury could not agree on prosecutors’ claims that the men were specifically intending to blow apart jets in the air over the Atlantic.
Jurors failed to reach verdicts on four other defendants: Ibrahim Savant, Arafat Waheed Khan, Waheed Zaman and Umar Islam.
All seven had previously admitted conspiring to cause a public nuisance.
The eighth man, Mohammed Gulzar, who was described by the Crown as the key link between the British plotters and Pakistani terrorists, was found not guilty on all counts. He cannot be retried.
The jury of eight men and four women had been deliberating for more than 50 hours by the end of the five-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court.
There was criticism of the trial judge’s handling of the case when he allowed the jurors a two-week holiday after they had retired to consider their verdicts.
The police investigation into the plot led to new restrictions being imposed on air travel that have caused major delays and inconvenience for passengers.
Liquids above 100ml are not allowed in hand luggage to prevent explosive substances being smuggled past security.
Airlines including Virgin Atlantic have called for a review of these restrictions.
Tags: airlines plot, Barak Obama, Brown (Gordon Brown & his Labour Government, disastrous verdict, from June 2007, John McCain, re-trial airline plotters, Shami Chakrabarti, terrorists convicted, terrorsits trial february 2009
February 18, 2009 at 12:00 pm |
I’m not so sure about the infallibility of the jury in a terror trial.
It’s rather like those juries in the days of Al Capone where there was a real fear of gangster reprisals if the “wrong” verdict was delivered. Only these days the tentacles of terrorism stretch much further and any jury member must worry about the possibility of being caught by them if he or she does their civic duty.
Not to mention the tentacles of the dreaded Chakrabarti brigade.
February 18, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Good! Another person who doesn’t rate Shami Chakrabarti.
The time is long overdue when such as her were outed for what they are – a fifth column.
What you say on the “fear” issue is interesting, Stan. I wonder if that could have been the case?
I think it is more likely though that the police’s evidence was ambiguous, or the defence painted it as such,and convinced the jury.
When push comes to shove I think people will find that we Brits don’t take too kindly to being intimidated. FEAR?
“THEY” ain’t seen nothing yet.
At least we are now getting rid of Abu Qatada, OBL’s right-hand man in Europe, according to the news.
Hang on – is that Shame of Chakrabarti I see rushing to his side and reading this ‘apology for humanity’ his “Human Rights”?
Wonder how she has time to do this, when she is surely SO BUSY reading Geert Wildes HIS!?
September 7, 2009 at 5:32 pm |
[...] was a re-trial. I reported on the earlier failure to convict here in February as well as here on the earlier charges and plot against our country and the west in general by [...]