FOR two years Saajid Badat hid the evidence of his secret life as an al-Qaeda suicide bomber in a green case under his bed in his parents’ terraced house in Gloucester.
In that bag was the detonator for the high-explosive device with which he had been ordered to blow up a transatlantic airliner, killing himself and the hundreds of passengers on board.
Badat, 25, a grammar school boy with four A levels, was part of the same terrorist unit as Richard Reid — the British shoe bomber now in prison in the United States.
In a plot hatched by Osama bin Laden and his associates in their Afghan hideaway, the two Britons were to form the second wave of terrorist spectaculars after the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
At the Old Bailey yesterday, Badat pleaded guilty to conspiracy to destroy, damage or endanger an aircraft. He could face life imprisonment when he is sentenced this month.
His unexpected guilty plea came on the day that MPs debated the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Bill which would give the Home Secretary power to place suspects under house arrest.
As Badat stood in the dock, the Prime Minister used a radio interview to state that the new powers were being sought to deal with “several hundred” people who were “engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts”.
Badat, who was born and raised in Gloucester, is the first person to admit his involvement in a significant al-Qaeda plot before a British court.
When Reid was flying from Paris to Miami, in December 2001, Badat was supposed to have been on board another transatlantic flight from a European airport, possibly Schipol in Amsterdam.
In the middle of the night, the two aircraft were to be blown out of the sky. But something — maybe conscience, maybe fear — persuaded Badat to withdraw from the plot to commit mass murder.
On December 14 2001, he e-mailed his al-Qaeda handler in Pakistan and indicated that he was not going to complete his mission.
Then he tried to pick up the threads of the life he had led before his dalliance with suicide terrorism. He once again became the earnest young man whom his family and friends had known for years.
Saajid Muhammad Badat was born in Gloucester maternity hospital on March 28, 1979, the first son of Muhammad and Zubeidah Badat. His parents had emigrated to Britain from Malawi, part of the wave of Asian migrants who left East Africa for Britain in the 1970s.
Badat’s father worked in the Walls food factory in Gloucester and his mother concentrated on the traditional role as mother to her four children.
He attended St James Church of England primary school and was bright enough to secure a place at The Crypt, one of Gloucester’s most sought-after grammar schools.
The school remembers Badat as a successful student who passed ten GCSEs and four A levels, obtaining B-grades in physics, chemistry and biology and a C in general studies.
David Lamper, the headmaster, said: “He was a quiet boy who took his religious beliefs very seriously. His tutor in the sixth form commented on how he worked with maturity and commitment. He was punctual, cheerful and polite.”
Badat was also a keen football fan, supporting Liverpool and playing for the Asian Stars, a Sunday league team. After leaving school in 1997, Badat devoted himself to the wish that he had held since childhood to become an Islamic scholar and preacher.
That meant leaving the UK to study in the Middle East and, significantly, Pakistan.
Many of the madrassas, or religious schools, of Pakistan were hotbeds of Islamism where a blend of fundamentalist faith and anti-Western politcs, heavily influenced by the jihad in Afghanistan, formed the curriculum.
Investigators believe that Badat was under the influence of radical Islamists at least from 1999. He is believed to have spent time across the Afghan border in an al-Qaeda training camp.
In 2001, with many al-Qaeda activists, he returned to Western Europe to integrate and await his call to action. It may have come sooner than Badat expected. On September 11, the day that 19 al-Qaeda hijackers crashed airliners into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Badat went to the British Embassy in Brussels to ask for a replacement passport.
His false claim that he had lost his original was made in order to help him to obtain multiple travel documents. Reid, his co-conspirator, made identical requests at British consulates in Amsterdam and Brussels.
Both men were in contact with other al-Qaeda activists in Belgium, including Nezar Trabelsi, a former professional footballer, who was part of a terrorist cell plotting attacks on a US airbase and the American Embassy in Paris.
Trabelsi, arrested in possession of firearms and explosives on September 13, was himself part of a network which had been run from Leicester and London by Djamel Beghal, now in French custody.
Around November 20, according to US court papers, both Badat and Reid were back in Pakistan. At this time, it is believed, they entered Afghanistan where they were supplied with their shoe bombs made from PETN plastic explosive that they could not be detected by airport security equipment.
They returned to Europe and established a series of e-mail accounts under various identities to keep in touch. By December 10, Badat was back in Britain with the bomb. But, at home in Gloucester, removed from the fanatical dedication of his comrades, he was beginning to have second thoughts. Badat was a more intelligent man than Reid, an easily led petty thief who had converted to Islam in prison. His e-mail to his handler indicated that he was wavering.
Richard Horwell, prosecution counsel, told the Old Bailey: “He had booked a ticket to fly from Manchester to Amsterdam in preparation for an onward flight to the United States on which the explosive device would be initiated. But he did not take that flight. We accept by then he had withdrawn from the conspiracy . . . The device he brought with him to the UK was kept at his home. He had separated the fuse and the detonator from the plastic explosive.”
Badat placed the detonator in a green case and hid it under his bed. He concealed the explosive, rolled up in a sock, in another suitcase and put that in a cupboard on the first-floor landing of his family’s home.
Five days later passengers on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami overpowered Reid as he tried unsuccessfully to light with a match the fuse for the device hidden in his shoe.
Forensic science examination showed that the detonator cord for Reid’s bomb and Badat’s device were two parts of the same length of material.
Badat could not have escaped the news of Reid’s arrest, which made headlines around the world. But he said nothing to anyone of his own involvement in the plot.
POSSIBLE TARGETS
Airlines flying from Schiphol to the US:
American Airlines
Delta Airlines
Continental Airlines
Northwest Airlines
United Airlines
US Airways
