Younes Tsouli, Waseem Mughal and Tariq Al-Daour were convicted
at Woolwich Crown Court and have been sentenced to a combined 24
years in prison in a trial which began in April. The three men
initially pleaded 'not guilty' but changed that plea two months
into their court case.
It is illegal to operate websites inciting terrorism under the
Terrorism Act. That law extends to websites hosted abroad.
The three men pleaded guilty to inciting another person to
commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the UK which
would, if committed in England and Wales, constitute murder.
Tsouli hosted a chat site dedicated to holy war to which a
message was posted which purported to be from a group of 45 doctors
who wanted to use car bombs and grenades to launch attacks in the
US.
Tsouli was jailed for 10 years and the judge Justice Openshaw
recommended that he be deported to his native Morocco once he had
served his sentence.
The three admitted to defrauding banks and credit card
companies, and Al-Daour was also involved in a £1.8 million fraud.
From the United Arab Emirates but living in Bayswater, Al-Daour was
jailed for six and a half years.
Mughal was British and was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years
in jail.
The three men used websites to incite other Muslims to wage war
on non-believers. The three believed in a global conspiracy to wipe
out Islam and had links to al Qaeda in Iraq, the court heard.
They are the first people to be convicted in the UK of
incitement to murder over the internet.
EU Justice, Freedom and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini
said this week that he wants to criminalise other kinds of internet
publishing. He said that he wants to make it illegal to post
instructions on how to make a bomb on the internet.
"I would propose the incrimination of dissemination of
information of bomb making and explosives," he told journalists
last week. "I think it's simply not possible to make people free to
instruct other people on the internet on how to make a bomb."
"That is nothing to do with the freedom of expression, you can
imagine, and my proposal will be to criminalise actions and
instructions to make a bomb. It's too frequent, it's too often,
unfortunately, we discover websites that contain complete
instructions to home made bombs," he said.
The proposal is likely to anger civil rights campaigners who
could argue that the plan is a limit to freedom of speech.
Frattini said that such actions would be policed only with the
help of the internet industry. "The idea is to contact as many
providers as possible to get their cooperation and to start closing
websites and of course continuously checking the web," he said.
Frattini said that his plan would be amongst anti-terrorism
proposals to be published in autumn.
