The Muslim fanatic who brainwashed the 21/7 bomb plotters at secret terror training camps across Britain has been found guilty of soliciting to murder, after a police and MI5 surveillance operation lasting more than two years.

Mohammed Hamid, 50, a potent terrorist recruiter who called himself “Osama bin London”, faces a lengthy jail term after being convicted of grooming gangs of young recruits to kill nonbelievers.

Assisted by Attila Ahmet, the former bodyguard to Abu Hamza al-Masri, the notorious cleric, Hamid aspired to radicalise young men from the London area and send them on terror campaigns in Afghanistan and East Africa. The extent of the conspiracy – and the operation to ensnare the ringleaders and their recruits – can be revealed after reporting restrictions were lifted at the end of a four-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court.

After deliberating for 22 days the jury found three of Hamid’s followers – Kibley Da Costa, 25, Muhammad al-Figari, 45, and Kader Ahmed, 20 – guilty of attending terror camps in the New Forest and at a Berkshire paintballing centre. Two other members of the gang – Muhammad Kyriacou, 19, and Yassin Mutegombwa, 23 – also admitted attending the camps at a separate court hearing yesterday.

Expert View

Hamid, Ahmet and their associates may well have been the last graduates of Abu Hamza's Finsbury Park terrorist finishing school

Sean O'Neill, Crime and Security Editor

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Ahmet, who once boasted of being “the No 1 al-Qaeda in Europe”, pleaded guilty to all three counts of soliciting to murder before the start of the trial.

Mousa Brown, 41, was cleared of providing and receiving weapons training and has been freed from custody.

Theirs were the first prosecutions under new terror legislation that makes it illegal to attend terrorist training, as well as to organise it.

The court heard that Hamid organised outdoor activities including camping and paintballing at remote beauty spots in the Lake District, New Forest, Berkshire, Kent and East Sussex. He claimed that the trips were nothing more than an innocent fun-and-fitness programme. However, covert photographers recorded Hamid and his followers as they carried out mock military training exercises.

His home in East London was bugged. Phone calls, text messages and e-mails were monitored and intercepted before an undercover policeman infiltrated the group for five months. Hamid was secretly recorded boasting that the murder of 52 people on London Transport on July 7, 2005, was “not even breakfast for me”.

Among Hamid’s pupils were the four July 21 failed bombers – Hussain Osman, Ramzi Mohammed, Yassin Omar and Muktar Said Ibrahim, the ringleader – who were later identified as attending the camps in the Lake District in 2004.

Two of the failed bombers – Mohammed and Osman – joined the gang again for a paintballing session at the Springwood Centre, in Tonbridge, Kent, several weeks before attempting to detonate rucksack devices on the London transport network.

A senior antiterrorist source told The Times: “Hamid may not have planned the attacks but he was responsible for the state of mind of the people who carried out 21/7.”

Sentencing the five followers yesterday, Mr Justice Pitchers said that Hamid and Ahmet were “charismatic and powerful figures” in their own different ways. He said: “By voluntarily attending where such training was taking place these defendants gave support, encouragement and, by definition, approval of those who did intend to carry out terrorist acts.

“Even though the camping and paintballing trips were enjoyable, you cannot have been in any doubt from what was said at the meetings and the form of the training that the underlying purpose of the camps was a sinister one.”

Deborah Walsh, deputy head of the Crown Prosecution Service counter-terrorism division, said: “No one should be in any doubt as to how serious Hamid and Ahmet were in encouraging their recruits to inflict casualties on innocent people.”

She also praised the “professionalism and bravery” of the undercover police officer, codenamed Dawood, who infiltrated the group.

Hamid and Ahmet will appear for sentencing on March 7. Their five followers were each jailed for up to four years 11 months. However, some of them could be free in just three months, having already served 17 months in custody.

— Senior police officers had trouble convincing the British public of the scale of the terror threat facing the country because of lies over weapons of mass destruction, Britain’s antiterror chief said yesterday.

Peter Clarke, Assistant Commissioner, Specialist Operations, who retires this week, told the Association of Chief Police Officers counter-terror-ism conference: “When we were saying there is a domestic threat there was a degree of scepticism.”

He added that public reaction had now changed because a series of trials had shown that the threat was real and not made up.

Deadly aims

Transcript of a covert recording in July 2006. Attila Ahmet has been talking to Hamid about his desire to become a suicide bomber:

Hamid You know what happened on the Tubes, right, how many altogether, four people shaheed [martyred]. Allah wa Allah I have to say this is as well, but four people got shaheed, right, how many people did they take out?
Ahmet Fifty-two.
Hamid Fifty-two, that’s not even a breakfast for me.
Ahmet I know it’s not.
Hamid That’s not even a breakfast for me, for me in this country, do you understand me?
Ahmet Hmm.
Hamid . . . Remember this, people, that never get caught, right, don’t let your ego go forward, let your intelligence go forward for the sake of Allah, use your hikma [wisdom] and be effective, see how many gets it, see how many you can take at the same time.

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