AS IS typical of the British travelling public, passengers on the NX333 coach from Weymouth to Manchester avoided conversation.

One young man, engrossed in the Koran and occasionally making calls on his mobile phone, seemed particularly keen not to draw attention as the coach trekked north.

Outwardly, there was no sign that on that day — January 9, 2003 — that he was the most wanted man in Britain.

Inwardly, he was afraid and increasingly desperate. Manchester, where he would find a safe house and a contact who could bring a false passport, was his last chance of escape.

Until then, Kamel Bourgass had had one crucial advantage. He was what police call a “clean skin”. There was no intelligence about him.

But just days before, the net had suddenly begun to close. On January 5, a raid on a flat in North London found the base from which Bourgass had been planning a chemical attack in Britain. It uncovered a kitchen-sink laboratory for making ricin, cyanide and other toxins.

Several men were arrested but the main suspect was still on the loose. He had a variety of identities, Kamel Bourgass and Nadir Habra among them.

He was the man on the NX333. Passport photos of him had been found in the flat and circulated to all police forces. The fear was that he might be carrying toxins and use them.

The danger that he posed was revealed when the search for him ended with a bloodbath in a bedsit in Manchester and the murder of Detective Constable Stephen Oake.

The ricin plot was uncovered almost accidentally as police investigated a Europe-wide fraud ring believed to be funding al-Qaeda. During that inquiry they made arrests across North London on September 18, 2002.

Among those held was Mouloud Sihali, a wheelerdealer who could arrange papers and flats for asylum seekers.

In Sihali’s flat in Ilford, police found five false passports, including one bearing the picture of a key terrorist suspect. They also found an address in Thetford, Norfolk, where David Khalef was arrested. Sihali and Khalef were later acquitted of terrorism charges but convicted of passport offences. In Khalef’s holdall, officers had found a false passport and sheets of photocopied Arabic writing.

They were found to be instructions for the manufacture of poisons including ricin, cyanide and botulinum. Castor beans were the basic component for ricin with acetone needed to extract the poison. Cyanide could be made from fruit pips. The details were strikingly similar to formulas found by a reporter from The Times in an al-Qaeda house in Kabul after the fall of the Taleban in 2001.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Oh no, Mr Darling: you have failed
• BBC survives dogfight over Kennel Club expose
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone