Islamic State supporters guilty of planning 'most deadly' gun attack on Jewish targets in Manchester

Two Islamic State extremists have been found guilty of plotting a deadly gun attack on Manchester's Jewish community.

Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, were found guilty by a jury at Preston Crown Court on Tuesday.

They had bought assault rifles, handguns and ammunition for the suicide attack they planned on Jewish targets. They saw any Christian victims "as a bonus".

Saadaoui's brother, Bilel Saddaoui, 36, of Fairclough Street, Hindley, Wigan, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about the pair's terror plans.

Greater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Rob Potts said the plan would have resulted in "the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history".

The consequences of carrying out an attack in a crowded area on the Manchester Jewish community would have been "catastrophic", he said.

Saadaoui, the former owner of an Italian restaurant in a Norfolk seaside town, "hero-worshipped" Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the Paris attacks of 2015, and wanted to replicate the attacks in which 130 people were killed, the prosecution told Preston Crown Court.

He sold up, moved north and used part of the proceeds from his house sale to pay €5,000 (£4,400) as an initial payment for four AK-47 assault rifles, two handguns and 1,200 rounds of ammunition as he planned a marauding gun attack in revenge for Israeli attacks on Gaza.

His target was the same area of Manchester where terrorist Jihad al Shamie later stabbed a worshipper to death outside a synagogue on 2 October.

Saadaoui conducted a surveillance trip around the area with an undercover officer called "Farouk" and told him he wanted to target schools and gatherings, adding: "Young, old, women, elderly, the whole lot, killing them all."

He was caught "red-handed" by police following an undercover sting operation as he took delivery of the first shipment of weapons, supplied and deactivated by police, from the boot of a rented Lexus.

Police bodyworn footage showed him running 20 yards across the car park of the Last Drop, a Lancashire spa hotel, before he was grabbed by armed officers and brought to the ground on 8 May last year.

MI5 believe that Saadaoui had previously been in contact with an extremist called Hamid al Masalkhi from Cardiff, who had left Britain to join ISIS in 2013 but later died from cancer, sources say.

Saadaoui planned the attack with Amar Hussein, 52, a former Iraqi soldier who had claimed to be from Kuwait when he arrived in the UK in 2006.

Hussein, who had a previous conviction for carrying a knife, worked at Salim Appliances at Grecian Mills in Bolton and lived in a first-floor room at the premises.

The men planned to recruit two others, dress in Jewish clothing and move from place to place on an extended shooting spree that also targeted police and emergency responders.

At the home he shared with his wife and children in Abram, near Wigan, Saadaoui kept bees and green birds - a symbol of paradise in Islam - and he used his hobby to come up with a code for the purchase of firearms for the attack, calling the weapons goldfinches and the ammunition bird seed in messages to the undercover officer.

Saadaoui and Hussein twice posed as tourists at the White Cliffs National Trust nature reserve near Dover to observe the security checks at the port below, believing the weapons would be imported from France by the undercover officer.

Harpreet Sandhu KC, prosecuting, told the jury it "hardly had the innocence of a teddy bears' picnic".

Mark Gardner, chief executive of Jewish charity the Community Security Trust, praised police for thwarting the plans of the "incredibly dangerous individuals" behind the plot.

"To hear now that somebody was trying to obtain weapons and had put together a meticulous attack plan to go and kill as many Jews as possible, to hear that I think will make people very, very fearful.

"It may well have been the worst terrorist act in British history.

"Jews in Britain, and all over the world, have suffered terrorist attacks from the 1960s onwards. The names of the perpetrators change, the nature of the attacks is exactly the same."

He added: "The ideology of jihad is like the ideology of Nazism. They want to kill Jews. They don't care who those Jews are. They don't stop to ask these Jews what their opinion is of Israel, or whether they support Manchester United, or anything. They want to kill Jews, end of story. It's the same as Nazis."

'Largest and most complex' counter-terrorism investigation

Saadaoui, a former hotel entertainer originally from Tunisia, married an English woman called Jane and moved to Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, in 2012 and then to Great Yarmouth, where he worked in the shop at the Haven Holiday Park.

He bought the Albatross Restaurant for £25,000 in April 2018 but closed the business four years later, sold his house in Ipswich Road for £169,000 in May 2023 and moved to Wigan with his second wife, Michelle, and two young children.

He worked briefly at a discount store in Wigan called Bonkers Prices, then gave up work, claimed universal credit and regularly posted statements from ISIS on Facebook.

He started emptying his bank accounts - withdrawing £88,500 in cash - wrote a will, made approaches to criminal contacts in an attempt to get hold of a firearm, and asked Hussein to join his plot.

However, his postings drew the attention of MI5 and on 28 November 2023, they began an investigation, codenamed Operation Catogenic, described by police as the "largest scale and most complex covert counter-terrorism investigation ever conducted in the North West".

Investigators believe Saadaoui was already preparing to launch an attack. Farouk, the undercover officer, told his bosses he believed Saadaoui would "kill a lot of people" if they did not intervene.

The two men were on trial alongside Saadaoui's younger brother, Bilel, 36, who was said to have turned down the opportunity to take part in the attacks but received a copy of his brother's will and a key to a hidden safe containing money to provide for his brother's family.

Bilel had also married a British woman in Tunisia and was living in Hindley near Wigan with his wife and two step-children, where he kept a goldfinch called Barry and organised a Friday prayer circle in a friend's flat, sharing ISIS material on WhatsApp and making a video of himself working out, accompanied by an ISIS chant.

He was arrested at the Warehouse gym in Hindley, near Wigan, and charged with failure to disclose information about an act of terrorism.

How the plot unfolded

Saadaoui began posting material on Facebook supporting ISIS towards the end of 2022, using a series of 10 different accounts under false names, several of which used a picture of Abaaoud, the Paris attacker.

Following his move to Wigan "his focus was on planning his terrorist attacks," prosecutor Ms Sandhu told the jury at Preston Crown Court.

Saadaoui was "desperate to get his hands on firearms" and "intended to cause a colossal loss of human life through the terrorist attack he planned," the prosecutor added.

On 28 November 2023, MI5's internet intelligence and investigations unit began an investigation and Saadaoui was identified and put under surveillance on 9 December.

Four days later, an undercover officer called Farouk sent him a friend request on Facebook, pretending he had grown up in Brussels, close to the former home of Abaaoud.

Unknown to the team, on 22 December, Saadaoui used one of his accounts to join a Facebook group page for the Manchester Jewish Community in order to stalk his targets online and work out when they might be holding gatherings.

Within days, Saadaoui told Farouk he had a "trustworthy" brother he had previously asked to join him in launching an attack and that he wanted to follow in "the footsteps" of Abaaoud and "kill as many as possible".

In a voice note on Christmas Day 2023, he added: "These matters of running someone over with a car or using a knife is ineffective, what is needed is an automatic gun.

"We want to do the same as what Abaaoud done, God willing. We must run rivers of their impure blood."

On 15 February, Saadaoui met Farouk in Queen's Park in Bolton to discuss their plans to smuggle weapons into the country on a ferry, disguised as car parts.

Saadaoui told Farouk: "If we were to carry out this operation, we target the Jews. We start with the Jews and if there any Christians caught in the act, that is a bonus, but we start with the Jews."

In the early hours of 16 March, Farouk picked up Saadaoui from his home at 12.45am and they picked up Hussein and drove to Dover in a rented VW T-Roc where they posed as tourists at the White Cliffs National Trust nature reserve.

On the journey, Saadaoui was recorded saying: "The Muslims all over the world, if every brother implements on the Jewish people, honestly they wouldn't do what they do in Gaza now."

The following morning, 17 March, Saadaoui arranged to meet Farouk at Pennington Waterside and Marina in Leigh. From here they travelled to Prestwich where they walked past Jewish nurseries, schools, restaurants, coffee shops and synagogues, even entering a kosher supermarket.

As he went into detail about what they would do during an attack, Saadaoui called Jewish people "pigs and monkeys" and added: "Hitler, may God be exulted, was burning them, the Jews. Did you know?

"Imagine yourself amongst them and you are wearing a rucksack and then you start. They wouldn't have anywhere to escape," he added.

In court, Saadaoui claimed that he was being threatened by a "high-ranking" member of ISIS he had met at a mosque in Norwich.

Hussein refused to turn up for most of his trial. When he was arrested, police found two knives under the front seat in his car. He told officers: "I'm proud, be terrorist here, I'm proud. It's not from us, God sent to us. We are army from God."

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Assistant Chief Constable Potts described Saadaoui as an "extremely dangerous man" and Hussain as a "fanatical terrorist who is very, very entrenched and unrepentant in his views and his ideology and mindset".

He added MI5 and Counter-Terrorism Police became concerned that Saadaoui was a "genuine and credible attack-planner" at an early stage, and it was "the recognition of the risk that he posed that led us to run such a significant operation".

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