Tahir Aziz, 38, Naweed Ali, 29, Mohibur Rahman, 33, and Khobaib Hussain, 25, convicted at Old Bailey of preparing acts of terrorism

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Four men have been jailed for life for plotting a “Lee Rigby-style” terrorist attack to murder members of the police or military using a pipe bomb and meat cleaver.

Three of the men called themselves the “three musketeers” on a messaging app they used to plan the attack.



The trial judge, Mr Justice Globe, sentenced Naweed Ali,29, Khobaib Hussain, 25, both from Birmingham, and Mohibur Rahman, 33, from Stoke-on-Trent, to serve a minimum term of 20 years in jail for their “significant role” in the planned attack.

Tahir Aziz, 38, from Stoke will serve no less than 15 years, being judged to have played a lesser role.

Ali, Hussain and Rahman did not attend the sentencing hearing, instead staying at Belmarsh maximum security prison, where they were taken after the jury found them guilty.

The men, all from the Midlands, were unanimously convicted at the Old Bailey on Wednesday of preparing acts of terrorism, having amassed weapons and were thwarted by a major counter-terrorism operation.

They were arrested in August 2016 and counter-terrorism officials believe it was one of the most significant plots thwarted in the past year.

Globe said there had been four murderous terrorist attacks in Britain during the trial, that stretched from March to August.



He said: “These attacks demonstrate in stark form the carnage that can be created by different types of terrorist attack that can be carried out with a vehicle, explosives and loaded weapons.

“I am satisfied from the evidence and the jury verdicts, but for the intervention of the counter-terrorism unit of West Midlands police and the security services, there would have been not dissimilar terrorist acts in this country using at the very least the explosives and or one or more bladed weapons.”

The men were arrested on 26 August 2016 after a bag of weapons, including a pipe bomb, an air pistol and a meat cleaver with the word kafir (unbeliever) scratched on it, were found under the driver’s seat of Ali’s car. In Aziz’s car they found a samurai sword bought from a sex shop in Stoke for £20.



MI5 set up a fake delivery company based in Birmingham employing two of the men as they investigated the plot, which helped them get access to the men’s cars.

The prosecution said the four defendants were likely to have been planning an imminent “Lee Rigby-style” attack on a police or military target.

The prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones said the four men were influenced by the lorry attack in Nice, France, in 2016, and were probably planning to use their cars as weapons as well as the knives and pipe bomb in any attack.



The defence claimed the weapons had been planted by rogue undercover officers to frame the suspects and accused them of falsifying their notes and lying in the witness box.

Globe dismissed the claims of planted evidence as “totally unfounded”.

Three of those sentenced have previous terrorist convictions, and had served time in prison together.

Rahman and Aziz are understood to have visited the extremist preacher Anjem Choudary in May 2016, while he was on bail charged with urging support for Islamic State, for which he was later convicted.

After the men’s sentencing, Gareth Peirce, the solicitor for Ali and Hussain, maintained the innocence of her clients.

Despite the trial judge’s words exonerating the police of any wrongdoing and praising their work for preventing a mass casualty attack, Peirce said: “Recent history is quickly forgotten, yet the present case carries disturbing echoes for us of the case of the six innocent Irishmen, also from Birmingham, wrongly convicted of the bombing of two Birmingham pubs in 1974.”