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Ex-British Airways Worker Found Guilty of Plot to Destroy Plane

28 February 2011 21:01 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A former British Airways Plc software engineer was found guilty of plotting with Anwar al- Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric who supports violence against U.S. targets, to blow up a passenger plane, APA reports quoting â€œBloombergâ€.
Rajib Karim was found guilty of four counts of preparing to commit terrorism by a jury trial in Woolwich, England, the Crown Prosecution Service said in an e-mailed statement today. Karim, who joined British Airways a year after arriving in the U.K. in 2006 with the intent to plan attacks, pleaded guilty before the trial began to fundraising for the purposes of terrorism, prosecutors said.
Karim contacted Al-Awlaki in late 2009, and the two began plotting â€œto kill hundreds of innocent people,â€ said Colin Gibbs, a CPS prosecutor. â€œThey also discussed his potential to sabotage BA servers to cause disruption to flights, which would have resulted in a major financial loss.â€
Karim, who used software encryption to conceal correspondence with al-Awlaki, had a â€œdeep determination to plan terror attacks whatever the cost,â€ prosecutors said.
British Airways merged with Spainâ€™s Iberia to form International Consolidated Airlines Group SA in January.