As the U.S. is recovering from the shock of last week’s bombings of the Boston Marathon, yesterday, Salma Kabal was acquitted in the Woolwich Crown Court in Southeast London, United Kingdom, on charges that she withheld information from police concerning a terror plot involving her estranged husband, Ashik Ali.
Ali, along with Irfan Nasser and Irfan Khalid, the Birmingham “Gang of Three,” were convicted in February for plotting to use bombs in rucksacks with timers to bomb locations in London which the plotters hoped would cause greater casualties than the London bombings of July 7, 2005, which killed 52 people, and perhaps even the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. The men intended to place the explosives in crowded stations and shopping centers to “take out” as many as they could. Nasser and Khalid spent 15 months at terrrorist training camps in Pakistan. The conspirators were arrested in September of 2011 while constructing rucksack bombs at a safe house in Birmingham, England. At the trial of the trio, testimony was presented that they had financed their terrorist activities by raising more than £13,000 in bogus Muslim Aid collections. The men are expected to be sentenced in May, and are expected to receive life imprisonment.
The primary evidence against Ms. Kabal was a secretly recorded conversation between her and Ali, in which he told Ms. Kabal that they could not be together, advised her to have nothing to do with him, and warned her that her family’s home could be raided as a result of his activities. Prosecutors argued that the conversation showed that Ms. Kabal must have known that Ali was engaged in illegal activity. Ms. Kabal defended at trial that she thought her husband was just using jihad as an excuse not to get back together with her, and that he had found another woman.
“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” — Thomas Jefferson
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