Two men convicted for a UK conspiracy to murder hundreds of Jews amid escalating concerns over IS threats

Investigators say the intended attack shows the militant group’s renewed threat. Two men were found guilty on Tuesday of planning to kill hundreds of Jews in England in a gun spree inspired by Islamic State.

A week after an unrelated deadly attack on a synagogue in the adjacent northwest city of Manchester in October, Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, were put on trial by police and prosecutors, who alleged they were Islamic extremists who intended to use automatic guns to murder as many Jews as possible.

A “one of, if not the, deadliest terrorist attack in UK history” would have occurred if their plans had been carried out, according to Assistant Chief Constable Robert Potts, who oversees Counter-Terrorism Policing in northwest England.

Their convictions follow a mass shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney that left 15 people dead, just over a week ago.

The attacks in Australia were described as a “source of pride” by Islamic State. The jihadist organization has raised concerns about a rise in violent Islamist extremism despite not claiming responsibility.

European security experts warn that IS and related al Qaeda groups are once again seeking to export violence overseas, radicalizing potential attackers online, even though they do not pose the same threat as they did ten years ago when they held large portions of Iraq and Syria.

“You can see signs of some of those terrorism threats starting to grow again and starting to escalate,” foreign secretary Yvette Cooper of the United Kingdom stated last week.

PREPARED TO BECOME MARTYRS: TWO MEN

Saadaoui and Hussein, according to British prosecutors, had “embraced the views” of the Islamic State and were willing to put their own lives in danger to become “martyrs.”

Prosecutor Harpreet Sandhu claimed that when Saadaoui was detained in May 2024, he had organized the smuggling of two assault rifles, an automatic handgun, and nearly 200 rounds of ammunition into Britain through the port of Dover.

Saadaoui intended to acquire two more rifles, a second handgun, and a minimum of 900 bullets, he continued. Police claimed that because he was unaware that the man he was attempting to obtain the guns from, “Farouk,” was an undercover agent, his plot was never even close to being carried out.

According to Sandhu, the assault rifles Saadaoui requested were comparable to those used in the 2015 Islamist militant attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, which resulted in 130 fatalities. Saadaoui “hero-worshipped” Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who organized the attack, he continued.

In an apparent reference to the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, Saadaoui said in a letter to “Farouk,” whom he believed to be a fellow terrorist, that the Paris attack was “the biggest operation after that of Osama (bin Laden)”.

“Based on Walid’s communications and interactions with the undercover operative, and some of the things he said, that made it very clear that he regarded a less sophisticated attack with less lethal weaponry as not being good enough,” Potts stated.

“Because, in effect, it was his role and his duty to kill as many Jewish people as he could, and that wasn’t going to be achieved via the use of a knife or, for example, potentially a vehicle as a weapon.”

Hussein and Saadaoui had both entered not guilty pleas, with Saadaoui claiming that he had complied with the scheme out of fear for his own safety.

After yelling loudly from the dock on the first day of his trial, “How many babies?” in apparent allusion to Israel’s war in Gaza, Hussein did not testify and hardly showed up for his trial.

On a single allegation of plotting terrorist activities, they were found guilty in Preston Crown Court.

Despite his reluctance to participate in the attack, Walid Saadaoui’s brother, 36-year-old Bilel Saadaoui, was found guilty of neglecting to divulge knowledge concerning terrorist acts.

The growing threat of the Islamic state

Inspired by Islamic State, which first appeared in Iraq and Syria ten years ago and swiftly established a “caliphate” in which it declared its dominion over all Muslims and essentially displaced al Qaeda, the foiled plot is the most recent to occur in Britain and other countries.

Islamic State ruled over millions of people and enforced a harsh, harsh interpretation of Islamic sharia law when it was at its strongest, which lasted from 2014 to 2017.

Additionally, its fighters carried out or inspired attacks in dozens of locations worldwide, many of which were falsely attributed to Islamic State while having no real connection.

Following the Bondi Beach attack in Australia, the SITE Intelligence Group claimed that IS had incited Muslims to act elsewhere, specifically targeting Belgium.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a European intelligence official claimed that IS was flooding social media with propaganda. Although this only affected a small number of people, it meant that there were more terrorism investigations than the previous year.

In October, Ken McCallum, the chief of Britain’s domestic intelligence organization MI5, stated that since the beginning of 2020, his service and the police had stopped 19 late-stage attack plots and taken action against hundreds of additional terrorist threats.

“Terrorism breeds in squalid corners of the internet where poisonous ideologies, of whatever sort, meet volatile, often chaotic individual lives,” warned McCallum.