Pair guilty of plotting gun attack on Jews

Two men were convicted yesterday of plotting to “kill as many Jewish people as they could” in what police believe might have become the UK’s deadliest terrorist attack.

- Chris Osuh Community affairs correspondent

Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, were found guilty at Preston crown court of preparing acts of terrorism between December 2023 and May 2024. Jurors were told the pair had a “visceral dislike” of Jewish people and had answered a “call to arms” issued by Islamic State after the outbreak of war in Gaza.

They planned a marauding attack in Manchester, which has one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities.

Saadaoui identified targets, undertook reconnaissance and arranged the purchase and delivery of semiautomatic rifles. However, the man supplying the weapons was an undercover operative.

Known to them as Farouk, he had infiltrated jihadist social media networks and convinced Saadaoui that he was a fellow extremist.

Saadaoui was arrested in a police sting as he tried to take possession of two assault rifles, a semiautomatic pistol and almost 200 rounds of ammunition at the car park of the Last Drop hotel in Bolton on 8 May 2024.

The weapons were of the type used in Paris in November 2015, when 130 people were killed and hundreds injured in a series of terrorist attacks.

A third defendant, Walid’s brother, Bilel Saadaoui, 36, who worked in a discount shop, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism. The brothers, from Wigan, and Hussein, of no fixed abode, denied the allegations in a trial lasting almost three months.