Radical Muslim loses bid to cut sentence
Date published: 07 June 2013
A RADICAL Muslim who formed a “terrorist partnership” with his wife and plotted to wage “violent Jihad” against the Jewish community in Britain has had his appeal against sentence turned down.
Mohammed Sajid Khan (34), and his wife collected bomb-making materials and radical literature detailing how to wage a terrorist war between July 2010 and the spring of 2011. Khan, of Foster Street, Oldham, was identified and arrested with his partner before he could do any harm.
He was jailed indefinitely at Manchester Crown Court last July, having pleaded guilty to engaging in conduct in preparation for acts of terrorism. He was ordered to serve a minimum of seven and a half years before being eligible for parole.
His wife Shasta was jailed for eight years. The judge said her husband had been the dominant force in their “terrorist partnership.”
The husband’s lawyers asked Lady Justice Rafferty, Mr Justice Keith and Judge James Goss QC, sitting at London’s Criminal Appeal Court, to reduce his sentence, arguing that his wife had been the one in charge in a plot to acquire the ingredients, equipment and know-how to build an explosive device.
His lawyers argued the judge’s approach was flawed and that Khan had been led astray from his non-religious, unpolitical family background by his “radicalised” wife.
Joel Benathan QC for the husband said: “He came from a Muslim background but had not had a particularly religious upbringing and his family were not interested in politics.
“His wife set about the process of radicalising him and argued that had the judge taken this alternative view, it would have made a “vast difference” to the sentence imposed.
Lady Justice Rafferty disagreed: “In July 2010 he began to accumulate a large amount of violent supporting material. This amount was not the product of a short-lived or superficial interest”.
