A Muslim extremist has been found guilty of firebombing the home of the publisher of a controversial novel about the Prophet Mohammed and his child bride. Abbas Taj, 31, a minicab driver from Forest Gate, East London, had claimed he was simply giving two other men a lift to the house in an exclusive square in Islington, North London. The other men, Ali Beheshti, 41, and Abrar Mirza, 23, had already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to recklessly damaging property and endangering life following the attack at 2.30am on Saturday September 27 last year.
The men were under surveillance by police who had warned Martin Rynja, 43, and his partner John Basgne de Beauval, to move out of their four-storey townhouse, which had an office in the basement. Taj's car, a Honda Accord, had been bugged by officers and their conversation was recorded as they drove to the square. Beheshti was heard asking Taj: "You wanna be the emir [leader], yeh?" and Taj replied: "That would be you."
"You know what we gotta do, anyway, innit?" Beheshti added.
In the early hours of September 27 last year the three men were observed driving twice through the square in Islington before Beheshti and Mirza approached the front door with a petrol can in a white plastic bag, poured diesel fuel through the letter box and used a disposable lighter to set it on fire. It was alleged that Taj, who was born in Somalia, East Africa, but moved to Britain at the age of 15, was acting as the getaway driver and as armed police swooped, his car was stopped near the Angel tube station not far away.
Mr Rynja, who ran a company called Gibson Square Books, had been planning to publish a historical novel by US author Shelley Jones called the Jewel of Medina about the Prophet Mohamed's third wife Aisha, who married him at the age of nine. The book was criticised for inaccuracy, sex and violence by academics and the publisher Random House, which produced Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, withdrew from the project, fearing a backlash from the Muslim community.
But on September 9, six days after Mr Rynja announced he was taking on the book, Mirza drove to his home and used an iPhone and Nokia mobile phone to take photographs of his house. The following day, Mirza used the Google Earth internet site to plan their approach to the house. Four days later Mr Rynja's sister, visiting from the Netherlands, noticed Beheshti's Mitsubishi Outlander parked in the square with Beheshti and Mirza inside.
Beheshti purchased the diesel near his home in Ilford, East London, on September 25 and took it to Taj's home in Forest Gate the following evening. That evening, the 27th night of the Muslim festival of Ramadan, known as the Night of Power, Beheshti and Taj left Taj's house to pick up Mirza before driving to Regent's Park Mosque in central London, arriving at 1.22am. They left for Islington at 2.01am with Beheshti, putting on a hooded top and tying his hair into a ponytail.
Beheshti, unemployed, from Ilford, East London, was a former member of the radical group al-Muhajiroun who had burned himself on a demonstration in May 2005 when he set light to a picture of George Bush. Calling himself Abu Jihad, he also took his 20-month old daughter, dressed in an "I love al-Qaida" hat, to the protests against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2006.
Taj, a trustee of the Muslim Prisoner Support Group [sic], said he had met Beheshti when the pair ran market stalls in Whitechapel Market in East London.