A man who plotted to bomb Britain using remote-controlled aircraft packed with high explosives was convicted of terrorism by a Canadian court yesterday.

Momin Khawaja, an al-Qaeda technical expert, boasted that he could build 30 remote-controlled devices to bring terror to London. A partially built model aircraft and a detonator ready to be operated were discovered when police raided his home. The gang planned a terrorist campaign to rival the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Evidence gathered by MI5 showed that Khawaja had discussed remote-control technology with a terrorist gang during a three-day visit to Britain in 2004.

He built a remote-controlled detonator designed, the court was told, to set off huge fertiliser-based bombs in and around London: the intended targets included the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London and gas supplies.

During the visit to London, Khawaja was followed by MI5 officers, and after returning to Canada he was monitored by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

In one intercepted e-mail, Khawaja, who once worked for the Canadian Foreign Affairs Department, wrote: “Praise the most high, we get the device working.”

Khawaja was arrested in March 2004 after a raid on his family home in Ottawa recovered electronic equipment, weapons and ammunition.

The Pakistani-born Canadian citizen was the first person to be charged under Canada’s AntiTerrorism Act introduced in 2001. His trial was held with a judge sitting without a jury.

Khawaja denied planning to attack Britain and insisted that he was simply preparing to attack British and American troops in Afghanistan.

His father is an academic in Saudi Arabia who has published works on conflict resolution that call for a better understanding of Islamic fundamentalism.

Lawrence Greenspon, for the defence, acknowledged that Khawaja, a software developer, had created a remote-control device for setting off explosives. But he insisted that it was meant for use against military targets in Afghanistan – not for a fertiliser bomb being constructed by the plotters in London. He said that the plotters never let Khawaja in on their plans to conduct attacks in Britain. The defence did not call any witnesses.

Judge Douglas Rutherford, of Ontario Superior Court, convicted Khawaja on five charges of financing and facilitating terrorism. The judge also found him guilty of two criminal charges related to the remote-control device, but not guilty of the terrorism portions of those charges for lack of evidence that Khawaja knew it was to be used in the fertiliser attacks.

Judge Rutherford said: “Momin Khawaja was aware of the group’s purposes, and whether he considered them terrorism or not, he assisted the group in many ways in the pursuit of its terrorist objective. It matters not whether any terrorist activity was actually carried out.”

The judge ruled that the prosecution had not proved Khawaja’s “guilty knowledge of the fertiliser bomb plot” in London. “There is no direct evidence that Khawaja knew of the ammonium nitrate fertiliser or the consideration of domestic targets” in Britain, he said.

However, Khawaja’s description to one of his co-conspirators about how the bomb detonator he built for them worked “leaves no doubt that Momim Khawaja knew he was building a device to trigger explosions”, the judge said.

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