Muslim converts found guilty of murdering British soldier

Lee Rigby’s widow, Rebecca Rigby, reacts as a police spokesman reads a statement on behalf of his family outside the Old Bailey in central London, yesterday.

Reuters/London

Two British Muslim converts were found guilty of murder yesterday for hacking a soldier to death in broad daylight on a London street in a gruesome killing that horrified the nation.

The murder, its impact magnified by video footage showing the culprits with blood-soaked hands explaining their actions, provoked a rise in hate crimes against Muslims in Britain, anti-Islamist street protests and government promises of tougher action on radical Islamist preachers.

British spy chiefs are facing questions over whether they could have prevented the attack on Drummer Lee Rigby, charges that echo previous criticisms of the security services.

A jury at London’s Old Bailey criminal court took about 90 minutes to unanimously find Michael Adebolajo, 29, and Michael Adebowale, 22, guilty of murdering Rigby, 25, an Afghan war veteran, near an army barracks in Woolwich on May 22.

The court heard they had driven around the area looking for a soldier and ran over Rigby, who was carrying a military backpack, then attacked his unconscious body with knives and a meat cleaver, trying to behead him.

They then dragged his corpse into the middle of the road where Adebolajo asked a bystander to video them, brandishing their weapons with their hands covered blood, as he calmly explained what he had done to the shock of startled passers-by.

“We swear by almighty god we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we’ve killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers,” Adebolajo said minutes after murdering Rigby, who had a two-year-old son. “He is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

Further footage captured the two men trying to ambush armed police as they arrived on the scene. Adebolajo charged towards a police car wielding a cleaver while Adebowale waited, clutching a rusty, unloaded revolver, hoping to be shot dead and martyred but officers fired and only wounded them.

The two men were found not guilty of the attempted murder of a police officer yesterday. During the trial, the pair never denied killing Rigby but Adebolajo argued the act should not be considered murder but an act of war - a war for  god in response to Britain’s foreign policy and Western wars in nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I am a soldier of  god. This is war,” Adebolajo told the court during calm, composed testimony watched by tearful members of Rigby’s family including his partner and mother.

The Crown Prosecution Service said it would ask the court to find that the murder was motivated by terrorism when the defendants come to be sentenced in January.

After the men were convicted of murder, Rigby’s family told reporters outside the court that justice had been served.

“Unfortunately no amount of justice can bring Lee back. These people have taken him away from us forever,” they said in a statement.

It was the first killing by Islamist militants in London since four suicide bombers killed 52 people in Al Qaeda-inspired attacks on the capital’s transport network in July 2005.

Home Secretary Theresa May said Rigby’s murder had “united the entire nation in condemnation” as a list of politicians, campaigners and faith groups paid tribute to the murdered soldier and denounced the actions of the killers.

Farooq Murad, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, described the murder as a “barbaric act” that disgusted the vast majority of Britain’s 2.7mn Muslims.

“They claimed that their act was done for those suffering in wars in Muslim lands. But it is my contention that the vast majority of our affected brothers and sisters would have nothing to do with this phoney act done in their name,” he said.

“We must all work hard to heal the divisions caused by this act.”

Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency is facing an investigation into whether it could have done more to stop the Woolwich attack, with a parliamentary committee examining what security services knew about the two men.

Both are Muslim converts from Christian Nigerian families and they previously handed out radical Islamist pamphlets and attended protests by the banned organisation Al Muhajiroun, many of whose members have been convicted of terrorism offences.

They were known to MI5, but not considered serious threats.

Adebolajo, who also goes by the name Mujahid Abu Hamza, is believed to have come to the notice of MI5 in 2011 when he was suspected of trying to join the Somalian Islamist group Al Shebaab but was arrested by Kenyan police.

Friends and colleagues of Adebolajo have alleged he was tortured and sexually abused in custody after being arrested in Kenya en route to Somalia, and then later harassed by MI5 agents, suggesting this might have pushed him over the edge.

Assistant Commission Cressida Dick of the Metropolitan Police, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer, said Rigby’s murderers appeared “lone wolves”, acting without instruction either at home or from abroad.

Like his accomplice Michael Adebowale, 29-year-old Adebolajo was raised in Britain by a devout Nigerian Christian family before converting to Islam.

Minutes after attempting to behead soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight outside his London barracks on May 22, Adebolajo told horrified onlookers he was “forced” to “fight them as they fight us. An eye for a eye and a tooth for a tooth”.

Adebolajo was known to British security services after being arrested in Kenya in 2010, close to the border with Somalia, home to the Shebaab Islamist militants who claimed responsibility for the deadly siege at a Nairobi shopping mall in September.

He told a Kenyan court he had wanted to go and live in Somalia under Sharia law.

Childhood friends remembered Adebolajo as a classroom joker with the same interests as any other British teenager—football, chasing girls, playing video games, and listening to rap music.

Detectives have tried to piece together how he turned from a church-going boy into an Muslim radical.

He converted to Islam in 2003 while studying politics at Greenwich University in southeast London—close to the barracks in Woolwich outside which Rigby was killed—and adopted the name Mujahid.

Adebolajo appeared at several public events with members of Al-Muhajiroun, a group founded by banned Islamist preacher Omar Bakri and proscribed under anti-terror laws.

Anjem Choudary, the group’s former leader in Britain, told AFP: “He used to attend some of our activities over the years. Very peaceful chap actually, not violent at all, very pleasant.”

Adebolajo was “a normal guy”, Choudary said, adding: “He used to propagate Islam, concerned about foreign policy.

“I wouldn’t say he was a member but he attended some of the activities, demonstrations, processions, talks.

“We lost any kind of contact with him about three years ago.”

Friends and family watched with concern as Adebolajo became increasingly radical.

In 2006 he joined a protest outside the Old Bailey—the same London court where he himself was convicted—in support of a Muslim accused of calling for the killing of British soldiers.

In a scuffle, he was convicted of assaulting a police officer and received a 51-day jail term.

He and 22-year-old Adebowale owned speeches and books about religious war and martyrdom, including works by US-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who reportedly had contact with three of the bombers in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US. After returning from Kenya in 2010, he was approached several times by MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency.

“He was pressured by MI5 for quite a while and ignored doorknocks and didn’t call his family on normal mobile phones for fear that they might track him down,” his brother-in-law James Thompson told ITV television.

“Eventually they did get hold of him and after some questioning they asked him to be a spy for them, which he obviously refused and from there he was just continually pestered.”

Adebolajo’s sixth child was born just four days before the brutal attack on Rigby, who was chosen at random outside his barracks.

BELOW:

Michael Adebolajo, 29, and Michael Adebowale, 22