Three cleared of plotting London 7/7 bombs, page 1

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LONDON (Reuters) - Three Britons were cleared on Tuesday of helping to plot the deadly London suicide bombings in July 2005 in the first prosecution over the 7/7 attacks which killed 52 people.

Mohammed Shakil, Sadeer Saleem and Waheed Ali were accused of scouting the city for possible targets with two of the four young British Muslims who detonated homemade devices in coordinated attacks on three underground trains and a bus.

Prosecutors said the three men were friends of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Jermaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain, attending the same Mosque and gym in the tightly knit town of Beeston, Yorkshire.

Although they were not directly involved in making the bombs or carrying out the attacks, detectives believed the men had helped plan the attacks.

A jury last year failed to reach a verdict against the men, and on Tuesday, Ali, 25, Shakil, 32, and Saleem, 28, were found not guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions at a retrial at Kingston Crown Court, the Press Association reported.

But Ali and Shakil were convicted of a second charge of conspiracy to attend a place used for terrorist training. Prosecutors said they were planning to go to a camp in Pakistan when police arrested them in March 2007.

"Thankfully a jury of ordinary people have unanimously been able to see this case for what it was -- guilty by association," Saleem said in a statement read by his lawyer outside court.

"In my view, the police wanted somebody, anybody, to pay for the murder of 52 people."

Detectives found that about seven months before the bombings, Shakil, Saleem and Ali spent two days in London with Hussain and Lindsay, visiting tourist attractions such as the London Eye, the Natural History Museum and the London Aquarium, and locations similar to ones attacked on July 7.

Here are the report on the bombings...
Review of the Intelligence on the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 (published May 2009)

This Report considers whether the UK security and intelligence Agencies had any knowledge of, and/or involvement in, rendition operations, and also the Agencies' overall policy for intelligence sharing with foreign liaison services./quote]

'' Families of victims of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London have denounced a parliamentary investigation into the events as a “whitewash”. They accuse Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which issued a report of its investigation last week, of covering up the failure of MI5 to stop the four suicide-bombers who killed 52 people and injured 700.

Sean Cassidy whose son Ciaran died on the London underground, said, “This is a complete whitewash. We now need a public inquiry. It is the only thing that will answer all the questions. It has to be independent. We are four years on and there are still no answers.”

Robert Webb, whose sister Laura died, said, “The ISC report seemed to give the benefit of the doubt to MI5 in a way the Hutton Report or the Butler Inquiry did to MI6 over Iraq... I feel I owe it to Laura to get some answers... We need a fair independent inquiry that asks robust questions of MI5 and the police into why decisions were made and looks at wider questions of why these men did what they did.”

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