The plan would have resulted in “the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history”, according to Rob Potts, the assistant chief constable of Greater Manchester police.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, the former owner of an Italian restaurant in a Norfolk seaside town, “hero-worshipped” Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the 2015 Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed, Preston crown court was told.
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 part of Manchester where the terrorist Jihad al-Shamie later stabbed a worshipper to death outside a synagogue on October 2.
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 after 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.
Video from police bodycams showed him running 20 yards across the car park of a Lancashire spa hotel before he was grabbed by armed officers and brought to the ground on May 8 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, 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, lived in an upstairs room at the appliance store where he worked in Bolton.
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. 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, for the prosecution, told the jury it “hardly had the innocence of a teddy bears’ picnic”.
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. He worked in the shop at the Haven Holiday Park and later bought the Albatross restaurant.
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In 2023 he moved to Wigan with his second wife, Michelle, and two young children. He worked briefly at a discount store, 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 and made approaches to criminal contacts in an attempt to get hold of a firearm.
His posts drew the attention of MI5 and on November 28, 2023, they initiated Operation Catogenic, described by police as the “largest scale and most complex covert counterterrorism investigation ever conducted in the northwest”.
Investigators believe Saadaoui was already preparing to launch an attack. Farouk, the undercover officer, told his bosses he feared Saadaoui would “kill a lot of people” if they did not intervene.
In a voice note to the undercover police officer sent on Christmas Day 2023, Saadaoui said: “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 February 15 Saadaoui met Farouk in Queen’s Park in Bolton to discuss their plans to smuggle weapons into the country. Saadaoui told Farouk he wanted to rub the blood of his victims on his body and added: “If we were to carry out this operation, we target the Jews. We start with the Jews and if there are any Christians caught in the act, that is a bonus, but we start with the Jews.”
Saadaoui and Hussein were on trial alongside Saadaoui’s younger brother, Bilel, 36, from Hindley, Greater Manchester, 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 the key to a hidden safe containing money for his brother’s family. He was found guilty of failure to disclose information about an act of terrorism.
They will be sentenced in February.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/islamic-state-jewish-manchester-ggmqsfhkh
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