Student Uses Internet to Spread Terrorism

A student belonging to Muslim community, who once threatened to be a suicide bomber, was convicted on September 17, 2007 on several counts of terrorist crimes.

A panel of judges found 21-year old Mohammed Atif Siddique of Alva, Scotland, guilty of acquiring and distributing terrorist material over the Internet and supplying instructional material on explosives and guns also via the Internet. He is going to be sentenced in October 2007.

Horrific footage of terrorism in Iraq, video films showing smiling young men who were explaining why they would explode a bomb, even if it meant killing other people and themselves, all for the sake of glorifying Allah and Islam, were shown in the material distributed by Atif.

Authorities found these propaganda films on a laptop that Siddique was carrying when he was caught while preparing to take a flight to Pakistan from Glasgow Airport.

But Siddique's lawyer, Aamer Anwar, defended his client saying that he was just doing what innumerable young adults commonly do - searching for solutions on the Net. Reuters reported Anwar's statement on September 17, 2007. Anwar said his client might appeal.

Police detained and interrogated the Scotland-born and son of Pakistani immigrants at Glasgow Airport in April 2006 when he was getting ready to fly to Pakistan from the airport. Police took away his tickets, passport and laptop. After eight days, Siddique was arrested during a dawn raid in his house. Police seized his computer and unearthed more material on floppy disks, CDs and computer hard drives.

Investigators from Central Scotland Police e-crimes division, with the assistance of experts from the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency inspected, the computers and managed to recover the erased files, and were also able to make out and read some over-written material.

They understood that Siddique ran three active Websites, which were all shutdown. These sites had links to other sites hosting fundamentalist literature that justified suicide bombings and summoned young Muslims to follow Jihad - the holy war against the West.

Among other British terrorism cases, computer evidence had led to the conviction of a British man for possessing documents relating missile-building instructions and three more men for inciting terrorism via sites advocating death of Muslim in July 2007.

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» SPAMfighter News - 10/4/2007