An international student from Pakistan who came to the UK to study has been jailed for 40 years in the US for terror offences.
A judge in New York has sentenced Abid Naseer, 29, for plotting to attack targets in Manchester city centre and the New York subway.
When he was arrested in Manchester in April, 2009, counter-terrorism officers claimed Naseer was just two days from carrying out an attack in Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre on the busy Easter bank holiday weekend.
In a Brooklyn courtroom, a US federal judge has sentenced him to 40 years in jail after he was extradited to America.
According to Manchester Evening News, Naseer’s attack was thwarted after Government spying station GCHQ intercepted coded emails between Naseer and senior Al Qaeda commanders, which referred to an imminent “wedding”, or terror strike.
On Wednesday April 8, 2009 – two days after the “wedding” email – police swooped on a series of addresses in Liverpool and Manchester, Naseer was held by armed police at his terraced home on Galsworthy Avenue. Nine others, all Pakistani nationals, were also arrested.
The Crown Prosecution Service ruled there was not enough evidence to secure a conviction.
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Most of the men arrested were deported as they were deemed a threat to national security.
Naseer was eventually extradited to the US where he was wanted over a plot to blow up a New York subway and a separate plot in Denmark.
Prosecutors in New York used evidence gathered in Manchester alongside other evidence against Naseer.
Naseer, from respectable family in Peshawar in Pakistan and an accomplished cricketer, had come to the UK in November, 2008, to study computer science at Liverpool John Moores University.
