FIVE men serving life for a bomb plot linked to al-Qaeda that could have killed hundreds of people have failed to convince Appeal Court judges they were wrongly convicted.
The five so called "fertiliser bombers" targeted a shopping centre, nightclub and the gas network with a giant bomb and were jailed for life at the Old Bailey in May last year.
They were found guilty after a 14-month trial - one of the longest an
d costliest in English legal history - and Judge Sir Michael Astill said at the time that Omar Khyam, Jawad Akbar, Salahuddin Amin, Waheed Mahmood and Athony Garcia had "betrayed their country".
In a nine-day hearing at At London's Criminal Appeal Court, lawyers for the five launched a wide ranging attack on the marathon trial process and argued their convictions were "unsafe".
However, Sir Igor Judge, sitting with Mr Justice Bean and Mrs Justice Dobbs, today dismissed their conviction appeals and said the "many and varied criticisms" of Sir Michael's handling of the trial were "unfounded". None of the five's other grounds of appeal rendered the jury's verdicts unsafe.
The five also had their life sentences upheld, although Garcia had his minimum jail term reduced from 20 years to 17-and-a-half years and Amin's was reduced from 17-and-a-half years to 16 years nine months, to take account of time he spent in custody in Pakistan.
Khyam, 25, from Crawley, West Sussex, was found guilty of conspiring to cause explosions likely to endanger life between 1 January 2003 and 31 March 2004.
Mahmood, 34, and Akbar, 23, also of Crawley; Amin, 31, from Luton, and Garcia, 24, of Barkingside, east London, were also convicted and all five were warned by the trial judge that their crimes were so grave that they may never be released.
The alleged targets discussed by the five included the Bluewater shopping centre, the utilities network, the Ministry of Sound nightclub, Parliament and a football stadium.
According to the prosecution, the group had bought 600kg of ammonium nitrate from an agricultural merchants and kept it at a storage unit in Hanwell, west London.
This fertiliser was to be the key component in the massive bomb - similar to those used in other terrorism attacks around the world.
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