Heathrow Case Ends With No Conviction on Key Charges

The New York Times reports, Heathrow Case Ends With No Conviction on Key Charges "A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended on Monday with the jury convicting three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder. But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the most serious charges, involving an alleged conspiracy to have suicide bombers armed with soft-drinks bottles filled with liquid explosives destroy seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada on the same day."

This was the incident that resulted in us not being able to bring liquids on planes and it was just 2 years ago. I'm not sure what the "conspiracy to commit murder" was if not a terrorist act, but I'm not willing to learn British law too. Remember there were issues with the timing of the arrests. Supposedly the US forced the UK to arrest them sooner than they wanted, to oh, build up a case. Kevin Drum wondered if the timing was politically motivated.

In todays report we see: "But Mr. Rauf was arrested in Pakistan in August 2006, setting off a chain of events that led British police to roll up the London-based cell earlier than they had wanted. The haste in making sweeping arrests in the plane-bombing trial, including that of Mr. Gulzar, appears to have been one reason why the prosecutors, in court, presented a case that failed to persuade the jury that the bomb plot had reached the stage where an actual attack on airliners was imminent."