A couple have been found guilty of planning an “ISIS inspired” bomb attack in the UK over the Christmas holidays.
Sudanese asylum seeker Hassan Mohammed, 36, and chemist Rowaida El-Hassan, 33, met on the dating site SingleMuslim.com early last year.
Food factory worker Mohammed now living in Derby, had a wife in Sudan – but persuaded El-Hassan that he should have a second wife.
Mother-of-two El-Hassan instructed Mohammed as he went shopping for a list of ingredients for the preparation of homemade explosives.
Munir Mohammed volunteered for a “lone wolf” UK mission as he communicated on Facebook with an ISIS commander called “Abu Bakr Kurdi” and pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State group.
Kurdi has claimed terrorist atrocities in Nice, Normandy and Orlando and called for lone wolf attacks throughout the world.
When he was arrested in December, Mohammed had a 200ml bottle of hydrogen peroxide and 500ml of hydrochloric acid – two of the three components for triacetone triperoxide (TATP) explosives, as well as manuals on how to make explosives, mobile phone detonators, and deadly ricin poison.
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When counter terrorism officers raided his home after his arrest, they found bomb manuals and instructions for ricin and mobile phone detonators, as well as hydrogen peroxide from a local pharmacy, a bottle of bomb making acid which he stored in his fridge, face masks, and a container holding a litre of almost pure sulphuric acid.
Prosecutor Anne Whyte, QC, said: “They exchanged materials and views at the time, we say, Mohammed was planning to perform an attack of his own, motivated and inspired by what he had seen and heard on social media.”
They will both be sentenced on Thursday 22 February 2018.
