An al-Qaeda suspect who downloaded bomb-making instructions to blow up an aircraft was yesterday jailed for six years at Belfast Crown Court.
The Algerian-born man, who was tried as Abbas Boutrab (27), was said to have used at least seven aliases since his first known arrest in Paris 13 years ago.
But after being found guilty of possessing and collecting information connected with terrorism, Mr Justice Weatherup accused him of a plot with even more chilling consequences than the decades of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland.
Passing sentence, the judge said: "Now we find the terrorism threat is subsiding and a new threat is emerging. This new threat has an added horror because the terrorist stands among the innocent men, women and children.
"That is a feature in the material that was recovered here. It provides instructions for improvised explosives with the object of bringing down an aircraft and the lives of all those on board."
Detectives from the PSNI crime operations department and agents of the British security services and the FBI as well as police in Ireland, France and Holland were involved in the intelligence operation which led to the capture of Boutrab.
He was arrested after an immigration raid on his flat at Whiteabbey on the northern outskirts of Belfast in April 2003.
During the raid, police seized 25 computer disks containing instructions which had been downloaded from the internet at Belfast's Central Library three months earlier. The files contained details of how to construct a bomb and smuggle it on board a passenger jet, the six-week trial was told.
Boutrab, who has protested his innocence, plans to lodge an appeal against his conviction. He was also found guilty of possessing a stolen Italian passport.
Mr Justice Weatherup told Boutrab, who refused to stand during the sentencing, that he would be recommending his deportation.
Boutrab, who police said had an allegiance to a terrorist group linked to the al-Qaeda network, was the first suspected member of an Islamic extremist group to be tried in Northern Ireland under the non-jury Diplock court system used to try loyalist and republican paramilitaries.
During the investigation, PSNI detectives sent the instructions they had seized to the FBI, where an agent was able to follow them and put together a device capable of bringing down an aircraft.
At one stage during the trial an FBI expert gave a bomb-making demonstration to the court in Belfast.
A video of the tests carried out at the Quantico Marine Corps base in Virginia was played in the courtroom. This showed a bomb which, when detonated, blew apart a mocked-up row of airline seats and ripped through the aircraft shell beside them. - (PA)