Guilty as charged; wait for the backlash

Married couple Mohammed Rehman, aged 25, and Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, have been found guilty of planning to mount a terrorist explosion in London, intended to mark the tenth anniversary of the “7/7” bombings. They will be sentenced later this week – probably tomorrow (Wednesday, 30th).

The truth of what drove them to think the unthinkable may never be known. In Court, Rehman was portrayed as a loser whose drug habit left him unable to hold down a job, while Khan was said to have kept her marriage to Rehman secret from her family, who disapproved of him. They were, between them, able to purchase materials and manufacture a plausible explosive device – yet Rehman openly discussed possible targets on Twitter. Other social media exchanges suggest that Rehman had become a fantasist who treated his “jihad” as an over-enthusiastic teenager might plan the next level of a video game rather than as an exercise in killing and injuring real people.

The police referred to the couple as dangerous individuals (true). The police said they “shared a radical and violent extremist ideology”, according to Asst. Chief Constable Laura Nicholson, head of the South East Counter-Terrorism Unit. Really? Were the two trying to convince others to follow a violent course by force of intellectual argument, or were they lost in their own fantasy world, where talking about killing and injuring people was as virtual as a video game?

Their families, very plausibly, denied all knowledge of the couple’s political activities or their preparations for acts of terror. Prosecutor Tony Badenoch QC said in Court that the two of them were looking for a sense of purpose in their lives, and began to identify with “Islamic extremism”. That may be one of the most chilling thoughts to come out of the trial: how many more social misfits could be taken in by a perceived glamour of the extremists? And, if they don’t discuss what they are doing on Twitter, how will they be found and stopped in time?

Rehman and Khan are not the only couple who have planned despicable crimes against humanity on a mass scale. However, they are the high-profile Muslim couple currently in the news – and that will stoke Islamophobia, which is already prolific in the West and which can only be countered if we all continue to work hard for peace and understanding.

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