A “lone-wolf terrorist” who plotted to blow up a hospital and a RAF base near Harrogate had been experimenting with firework gunpowder and fertiliser inside his garage, a jury was told.
Mohammad Farooq, 28, a clinical support worker, planned to carry out an Islamist terror attack with a homemade bomb at RAF Menwith Hill and St James’s Hospital in Leeds but was stopped in his tracks by hero patient Nathan Newby, Sheffield Crown Court heard.
A subsequent police search of Farooq’s home in Leeds revealed a plethora of items which the prosecution claims were linked to his alleged plot to blow up the US spy and radar base near Harrogate and the hospital where he worked.
Among the items were a gun holster, a meat cleaver, a toiletries bag containing blank-firing ammunition and 250g of saltpetre, or Potassium Nitrate, which could be used as a rocket propellant or gunpowder.
Farooq, who denies plotting a terrorist attack at the two sites, admitted that “on a few occasions” he had taken the gun holster to work with him at the hospital.
In a transcript of one of his police interviews read out in court yesterday, he was asked why there appeared to be “screws and things” in the firework powder, to which he replied: “It was for the garage really.”
He said he had stripped the fireworks and placed the powder into plastic tubs which he then “poured into the bomb”.
He claimed he kept the meat cleaver under his bed to “make me feel more safe (sic), so I slept more peacefully” because he was “paranoid” and having nightmares.
When asked what the 250g of Potassium Nitrate were doing at his home, Farooq claimed it was used as a fertiliser for a vegetable plot behind his garage as it was “supposed to be good for the soil”, and for “curing meat”.
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Farooq admitted he had been searching for “bomb manuals” on internet forums run by extremist Jihadi groups such as Al Qaeda but had not been looking for advice on how to carry out a terrorist attack.
Police seized documents such as ‘Safety and Security Guidelines for Lone Wolf Mujahideen and Small Cells” that he had downloaded from such forums.
Other documents downloaded by Farooq included the Anarchist Cookbook and the Improvised Munition Handbook 1969 Department of the Army, which, despite chapters on how to manufacture explosives, grenades, ammunition, mortars, incendiary devices and detonators, Farooq claimed “didn’t suit me at all”.
When asked if he had “any desire to be part of Al Qaeda” and carry out “Lone Wolf” attacks, he replied: “No, definitely not.”
He said he was simply looking for a manual “to make a realistic-looking bomb” and wasn’t (on the Jihadi forums) to look at anything extremist.”
He claimed he was simply trying to “get back” at his colleagues, specifically nurses, at the hospital against whom he had a grudge because he felt he had been “humiliated” by them, but “not to hurt them in any way, it was just to scare them”.
Other documents downloaded by Farooq included ‘How to make Semtex and other explosives, IEDs’, but he claimed that “wasn’t what I wanted”.
It’s alleged that Farooq’s initial plan was to target the US spy base near Harrogate, but he also planned to blow up part of the hospital and go on a terrorist spree with a firearm, a homemade bomb and a kitchen knife, with the aim of “killing as many people as possible”.
Prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford KC added:
“By January 2023, we say that the defendant had a become self-radicalised lone-wolf terrorist who had made preparations to commit a murderous terrorist attack in Yorkshire.”
At about 5am on January 20, Farooq was arrested outside the Gledhow Wing of St James’s Hospital.
Mr Sandiford said:
“The defendant was in possession of a viable improvised explosive device assembled from a pressure cooker and containing 9.9 kilos of low explosive.
“He had with him…two knives, black tape and a blank-firing imitation firearm. The crown’s case is that he had gone to that hospital to commit a terrorist attack (and) seek his own martyrdom by detonating the explosive device and using bladed weapons to kill as many people as possible.”
Farooq sent a bomb threat from inside his car in the hospital car park, but it only reached an off-duty nurse who didn’t see it until over an hour later. He had intended to cause an evacuation while he waited outside to detonate the bomb and then “attack any survivors with the bladed weapons”.
However, because the bomb threat wasn’t seen for over an hour, the evacuation didn’t initially occur, and when it eventually did it was only a “part-evacuation”, with people being moved within the hospital, not to the car park where Farooq had been waiting.
Mr Sandiford said:
“When the evacuation happened, the defendant drove away.”
He returned to St James’s a short time later with a new plan of attack which was to carry the weapons including the homemade bomb into Costa Coffee inside the hospital wing, wait for a change of shift so that it would be full of nurses, “then detonate it, killing as many of them as possible”.
However, “luck intervened again” when patient Mr Newby, who was having a cigarette outside the entrance, bumped into Farooq and “noticed that something appeared to be amiss with the defendant”.
He persuaded Farooq to follow him away from the main hospital buildings to a bench where he “succeeded in talking him down” and called police, who turned up to arrest the alleged would-be terrorist.
Menwith Hill was ‘Plan A’
Using cell-site technology, police discovered that Farooq had made at least two visits to RAF Menwith Hill between January 10 and the day of his arrest on January 20. He had chosen the US spy base “because it was believed that the base had had been used to co-ordinate drone strikes against terrorists in Syria and Iraq”.
The RAF base had been his “Plan A” of attack, but when this didn’t come off, Farooq targeted the hospital in Leeds because it was seen as a “softer” target.
Farooq later admitted that he had the bomb with him when he went to the air base but claimed he had just gone there “for a drive”.
He had also “obtained instructions for the preparation and manufacture…of five deadly toxins as nerve agents”, namely Ricin, Sarin, VX, Tabun and Tetrodoxin.
Farooq, of Hetton Road, Roundhay, has already admitted possessing an explosive substance in suspicious circumstances, possessing an improvised explosive device and pyrotechnic fuses.
He has also pleaded guilty to possessing a document likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism and having an imitation firearm with criminal intent, namely a Gediz 9mm PAK semi-automatic pistol, and possession of the same imitation firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.
The trial continues.
