Men convicted in British terror plot planned to use Finnish fertiliser for bomb

print this

A sack of fertiliser produced by the Finnish manufacturer Kemira GrowHow apparently almost became a deadly weapon in the hands of hard-line Islamist terrorists in Britain.
      Crime investigators say that a group of terrorists planned to use the nitrate fertiliser to manufacture explosives and bomb a shopping mall in Southern England and a night club in London.
     
The men were arrested before they could carry out any bombings and were sentenced to life imprisonment in April. They were found to have been followers of al-Qaeda, and had taken part in terrorist training in Pakistan. They were also found to have had connections with the four suicide terrorists who killed 50 people in a series of bombings in London in 2005.
      The GrowHow fertiliser bag took on its dangerous role in October 2003 when one of the terrorists, Algerian-born Anthony Garcia, saw it in an agricultural supply store in Burgess Hill.
      The terrorists had chosen Garcia as the buyer of the fertiliser, because it was thought that he might be less likely to arouse suspicion; Garcia has a lighter complexion than his Pakistani-born accomplices, and he had changed his name from the original Rahman Benouisis to a more European-sounding one.
     
Garcia got his 600-kilo sack of Kemira SingleTop fertiliser, although the salesperson in the Bodie Brothers store felt that there was something suspicious about the buyer.
      "It wasn't the time of year for using fertiliser", the shop employee later said at the trial, which lasted more than a year.
      The terrorists put the sack into storage in West London. It was later to be used for making explosives.
      However, the group did not know that the police were already on their trail. An additional tipoff came from a worker at the storage depot, who reported the suspicious sack.
      The police put the terrorists under surveillance, and they switched the content of the fertiliser bag for a harmless substance.
     
At this point, GrowHow became an important ally of law enforcement authorities.
      "The authorities - probably the Security Service - contacted us in February 2004. They wanted to know where a bag with Kemira's name and serial number had been bought", GrowHow's Ken Bowler told Helsingin Sanomat on Thursday.
      The required information was found in GrowHow's archives. The terrorists were arrested in the spring of 2004.
     
Kemira GrowHow, formerly the fertiliser group of Kemira, was listed on the stock exchange in 2004. Two weeks ago, the Norwegian company Yara made a bid for the purchase of the company.
      GrowHow maintained a low profile in the matter until the terrorists were convicted. The adventures of the fertiliser bag were published in an article in the new edition of a publication by the Finnish Chemistry Society.
      Bowler says that the aim of the hard-line Islamists was to manufacture the same kind of explosive that IRA terrorists had used in the 1980s and 1990s.
      "Nowadays if a farmer wants to buy a large amount of fertiliser, his or her identity is checked in many ways", Bowler says.
      Police accumulated an extensive amount of evidence against the suspects. In one security camera picture, one of the main suspects, Omar Khyam, appears with the fertiliser sack bearing the Kemira logo.


Links:
  British Security Service website: Terrorist trial convictions (30 April 2007)

Helsingin Sanomat