A BRITISH Muslim terror suspect, allegedly trained in firing mortars, was arrested en route to London through the Channel Tunnel with high-level traces of military explosives in his luggage.

In the first terrorist trial in Britain since the July 7 bombings, Andrew Rowe — a convert to Islam — faced charges yesterday of preparing or instigating violent attacks.

An Old Bailey judge ordered the jury trying Mr Rowe to completely disregard their feelings about the suicide bomb attacks on the capital.

Mr Justice Fulford said: “The public has been frightened and concerned about events such as those happening so close to home. But those incidents have nothing whatsoever to do with the guilt or innocence of this defendant.”

Mark Ellison, for the prosecution, said that Mr Rowe, who suffered shrapnel wounds to his legs during the Bosnian war in 1995, had been arrested at the French entrance to the Channel Tunnel in October 2003. In his luggage police found a tightly rolled pair of socks, with a metre-long piece of cord sewn on to them, which was impregnated with TNT and the military explosives PETN and RDX. Smaller traces of RDX were found on Mr Rowe’s jeans.

Mr Ellison said an Army expert witness would testify that the socks could well have been adapted for use in cleaning the barrel of a mortar or as a muzzle protector.

Two months before his arrest, a search of Mr Rowe’s former address in northwest London had uncovered a WH Smith notebook in which he had written 20 pages of detailed instructions for aiming and firing an 82mm mortar of the type manufactured in Russia or China.

A further search at the Birmingham home of Shabia Tafla, Mr Rowe’s estranged wife, uncovered a codebook for transmitting sensitive messages to possible terrorist associates.

Mr Ellison said that the code made it possible for Mr Rowe to send “seemingly innocent messages about mobile telephone models” which would have completely different meanings to his contacts.

Mr Rowe, a father of four, had been under surveillance for months before his arrest. Officers logged withdrawals from an Abbey bank account in which he had amassed thousands of pounds from invalidity benefit payments. In one transaction he withdrew £6,100 at the bank’s Portobello Road branch in West London..

He used “numerous, untraceable mobile phones” but analysis of one handset placed him in London, northern France and Amsterdam.

While in the Netherlands in August 2003 he applied at the British Consulate for a new passport claiming that his old one had been damaged through washing. The old passport showed significant water damage and a number of immigration stamps had been washed off and a visa apparently torn out.

Immediately before his detention, Mr Rowe had spent a week in Frankfurt where he had regular meetings at his hotel with an unknown man.

When told he was being arrested under the Terrorism Act, Mr Rowe asked police officers: “What terrorism?” Mr Ellison presented the court with a picture of Mr Rowe as a veteran mujahid who was committed to the militant ideology of al-Qaeda. He said Mr Rowe had begun his conversion to Islam in the mid-1990s and on its completion in 1997 had taken the Muslim name Yusuf Abdullah.

He added: “There is evidence that in autumn 1995 the defendant was injured in a mortar attack in Bosnia causing shrapnel injuries to his legs which required hospital treatment in Zenica, north of Sarajevo, for about three weeks as an in-patient.

“The area where he was injured for a time was a war zone. He was treated under the name Handala.”

On his return to England, Mr Rowe received further attention and told his GP that he had been a volunteer driver in Bosnia when he was hurt.

Mr Ellison said Mr Rowe was an ideological follower of Osama bin Laden and subscribed to the belief in jihad, or holy war, to defend Islam against its perceived enemies.

He played the jury a videotape glorifying the September 11 hijackers as martyrs which had been seized by police from an address used by Mr Rowe shortly before his arrest.

In his bags, the defendant had also been carrying audio cassettes with militant sermons about the obligation to fight jihad, calling on Allah to protect the Mujahidin from “unjust Christians and aggressive Jews” and demanding that Mecca be liberated “from the sons of the monkeys and the pigs”.

Other items recovered during searches of properties connected to Mr Rowe included radio transmission codes, literature about night vision equipment, books on guerrilla warfare and martial arts, and seven mobile phones.

Mr Rowe, who appeared in the dock dressed in a beige suit, denies four charges relating to the possession of the notebook with the mortar instructions, the sock ball with the explosive traces and the making and possession of the substitution code.

The trial continues.

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