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The return of the supergrass |
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Try to think of the Operation Crevice bombers (MI5's codename) whose principal actors received life sentences yesterday as unconnected to any other plot - just as MI5 mistakenly did in the fateful spring of 2004.
One major development stands out. The 'supergrass' (a terrorist who shops other terrorists in exchange for a deal with the authorities) is back - and a good thing too.
We did not have much luck with them in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. Guilty verdicts based on their evidence were usually overturned on appeal but Northern Irish trials had no juries - for fairly obvious reasons.
In this trial - despite ferocious and flamboyant cross-examination by defence counsel - the jury accepted the evidence of Mohammed Babar. A US citizen who faces trial in the US for terrorist offences, Babar was
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| Mohammed Babar was prepared to come to London and give evidence against fellow jihadists |
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prepared to come to London and give evidence against his fellow jihadists as part of a deal with US prosecutors.
He showed convincingly that the Operation Crevice plotters were no mere dreaming extremists but serious terrorists who had trained in Pakistan in order to murder their fellow countrymen and women in large numbers. The judge told the convicted men as he sentenced them yesterday that they were British and had betrayed their country.
Of greater significance is that one of their supposedly fanatical associates would betray the cause in exchange for a deal with an American DA - said to include a light sentence for himself and the relocation of his family from Pakistan under assumed identities.
Maybe some of these al-Qaeda types are not quite all they are cracked up to be. Forty years living under an assumed identity in Canada or Australia would doubtless have its stresses and strains, but it beats 40 years in an English jail. Expect British Muslim supergrasses soon. 
- THE SPOOK
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