A man charged with being part of a terrorist plot to blow up seven transatlantic airliners denied that he planned to harm anyone, telling a London court that he and friends were making a documentary.| Oh. Well. That makes it allright then ... |
``Something like that would be sensational -- it would create mass media attention,'' Ali told a jury in London today. ``Never did we intend or think about murdering anybody.''
| Sure, after all, small explosive devices have never killed anyone ... |
The men on trial -- Ali, Assad Sarwar, Tanvir Hussain, Mohammed Gulzar, Ibrahim Savant, Arafat Khan, Waheed Zaman, and Umar Islam -- have denied wrongdoing. They are all in their 20s. This is the first day of their defense.
In April, when the government opened its case, prosecutor Peter Wright said the group was almost ready to mount an attack when they were arrested in August 2006. Had the group succeeded its plot would have resulted in an unprecedented ``civilian death toll for an act of terrorism,'' he said.
The group planned to disguise liquid explosives in soft-drink cartons and had identified daily flights from London to Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, Washington, New York, and two to Chicago, prosecutors claim. The discovery of the plot caused temporary chaos at airports, with more than 2,380 flights from London canceled in the week after the men's arrest.
Prosecutors claim that a computer memory stick owned by Ali contained detailed timetables for the targeted flights. He is the first of the group to testify.
Another publicity stunt for the documentary, which would be posted on YouTube, was to film a sequence in which he and his friends would ``make demands in the style of al-Qaeda militants,'' Ali testified.
| Just a scene in the movie, of course ... |