LONDON — Prosecutors announced Wednesday that they would seek to retry seven Britons in an al-Qaeda plot to blow up U.S.-bound flights after a trial ended this week with jurors failing to accept the central premise of the case.
All seven men will be charged again with conspiring to detonate explosive devices aboard transatlantic passenger planes, according to a statement by Sir Ken McDonald, the director of Public Prosecutions.
A total of eight men, whose arrests in 2006 caused worldwide travel chaos and a ban on liquids in carry-on luggage, were tried in Woolwich Crown Court.
After a four-month trial, jurors stunned authorities Monday by failing to reach a verdict on the key charge: that the plot hatched by al-Qaeda in Pakistan involved sneaking liquid explosives aboard seven planes bound for North America, then assembling and igniting bombs in midair. The death toll could have exceeded the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, prosecutors said.
Jurors acquitted the alleged ringleader and failed to reach verdicts for four others, who nonetheless remain in jail because they pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of conspiring to cause a public nuisance. The jury did convict three men on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, apparently based on evidence that they identified other targets in addition to planes. The convictions carry possible life sentences.
The acquitted man is still in custody because he allegedly entered the country from Pakistan via South Africa with a fraudulent passport.
Although the arrest of a suspected al-Qaeda handler in Pak istan caused British police to round up the group earlier than they wanted, anti-terrorism officials believed that they had a powerful case built during months of high-tech surveillance.
Nonetheless, prosecutors were hurt by rules restricting the in-court use of communication intercepts and intelligence and evidence gathered overseas. The jury did not hear about alleged links to two previous al-Qaeda plots: the suicide bombings that killed 52 people aboard the London transport system on July 7, 2005, and a failed follow-up attack two weeks later.
Two British anti-terrorism officials said after the verdict that Muktar Said Ibrahim, the Eritrean-born convicted leader of the would-be July 21 bombers, was in extended phone contact with a central figure in the airline plot, Abdullah Ahmed Ali, who was convicted Monday.
Intelligence indicates that the two were in Pakistan at the same time as the leader of the July 7 plot, officials said, and they all were trained and directed by Abu Ubaida al-Masri, then-chief of al-Qaeda operations, the officials said.
Ibrahim also had contact with Rachid Rauf, who was arrested in Pakistan and allegedly served as a facilitator for travel and communications in the airline plot, officials say. Rauf escaped last year.
