Two UK terror trials came to an end this week.

Al Qaeda operatives used invisible ink to write down key phone numbers. This pen was found by police during a house search

On Tuesday, a jury in London convicted Bilal Abdulla of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Abdulla was one of two people who tried to detonate car bombs in London and then, on a suicide mission, drove a jeep filled with gas canisters into Glasgow airport. His partner, Kafeel Ahmed, died in the second attack.

The trial rightly received plenty of coverage. But the case itself failed to open up much, if anything, in the way of links to Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organisation. It was, it appears, a stand-alone operation.

Far more interesting, I think, was the result from Manchester this afternoon. For the first time in the UK, a jury convicted a man, Rangzieb Ahmed,  of directing terrorism. Not only that, they also convicted him, and his co-defendant, Habib Ahmed, no relation, of belonging to Al Qaeda.

We talk a great deal about people or plots being AQ-linked or AQ-inspired. Well here's a case, according to Greater Manchester Police head of counterterrorism, Tony Porter, that's indisputably AQ-core.

In many ways, the Manchester case was the polar opposite of the London one. It didn't have any plot or planned attack per se, but it had links to all manner of interesting people and plots. 

Here's a few:

Phone links between Rangzieb Ahmed and Yassin Omar, one of the failed London bombers.

Habib Ahmed named as a fellow traveller by Mohammed Junaid Babar, the supergrass whose testimony helped convict the fertiliser bomb plotters in May 2007.

Phone links with Abdul Rahman, who pled guilty last year to recruiting people in the UK to go and fight coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Habib Ahmed married by Omar Bakri Mohammad, founder of Al Muhajiroun, the UK's highest profile organisation supporting bin Laden ideology.

Finally, there are the links with a man at one time credited with being bin Laden's number three, Hamza Rabia.

The investigation itself included bugged conversations in Dubai, a luggage intercept at Amsterdam Schipol, and phone numbers written in invisible ink.

For a taster of the story, click here.

A court in London has been hearing evidence from Mohammed Asha, one of two doctors accused of conspiring to detonate car bombs in London and Glasgow in June 2007.

Taking the stand for a second day, Jordanian-born Asha described his relationship with his co-accused, Bilal Abdulla.

Asha said he and Abdulla were two entirely different characters. Asha described himself as serious and obsessed with his career in neurology. Abdulla, he said was not like that. Indeed, Abdulla regularly criticized him, he said, for being too materialistic and insufficiently concerned with the suffering of fellow-Muslims.

Asha told the jury how he had pleaded with Abdulla not to return to his native Iraq in the middle of 2006 after Abdulla had failed an important medical exam in Britain. "I made him swear on the Quran not to do anything foolish," he told Woolwich Crown Court.

Asha said Abdulla had become increasingly emotional and angry about the situation in his home country and he feared his friend was going back there to fight with the insurgency. "I will come back to Britain if you get me a job," Asha described Abdulla as telling him.

The court heard how in Abdulla's absence Asha succeeded in getting him an interview for a position at a Scottish hospital. Abdulla then returned to Britain almost immediately and, after being prepped by Asha, successfully landed the job.

Asha's lawyer, Stephen Kamlish QC, then proceeded to ask Asha about a series of phone conversations and meetings he had had with Abdulla in the months leading up to the attacks. The prosecution asserts these communications played an integral part in the alleged conspiracy.

Asha told the court he had handed over a mobile phone to Abdulla, at a meeting in Preston in February, because he had more than he needed. He described how he had bought four phones from a shop in Birmingham that offered cashback and free international calls so long as multiple phone contracts were purchased. Addressing the jury directly he asked: "Why would I give a mobile phone in my name to a person I know is about to commit a crime?"

The prosecution has argued that Abdulla and another man, Kafeel Ahmed, an engineer from India, drove down from Scotland to London in two Mercedes cars and tried to detonate them in the city's West End entertainment district. The jury was told the bombs' mobile phone detonators had failed to go off properly. The next day, the prosecution has said, the pair drove a third car into Glasgow airport and tried to blow it up in the terminal building but it too failed to explode. Ahmed later died of injuries sustained in the incident.

Asha and Abdulla both deny charges of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. The trial continues.

 LONDON, England – One day after Lord West's ominous warning of one  'great plot' being monitored by UK security forces, there was a reminder today  of the terror threat at the other end of the scale.

 Nicky Reilly, a 22 year-old convert to Islam, admitted launching a failed  suicide bomb attack on a busy family restaurant.

 The attack was carried out not in London, or in any other of the UK's major  cities, but in Exeter, a town of just over 100,000 people in the southwest of  England.

 Reilly had never travelled to Pakistan, for instance, to receive training; his  research was carried out on the Internet. Nor does it appear that he was part of  any cell – though more on that later.

The Old Bailey heard that Nicky Reilly entered the Giraffe restaurant in Exeter on a Thursday in late May carrying six bottle bombs, three containing caustic soda, three containing kerosene. He was also carrying nails packed around the devices to maximize the planned carnage.

CCTV footage shows plenty of people inside the restaurant as Reilly walked in, including a table of two women, one of whom is seen spoon-feeding her baby in a highchair.

Reilly made his way to the toilet cubicle to prepare his devices – which began to explode as he was doing so. He staggered out of the cubicle bearing serious facial injuries and was arrested by police.

Nicky Reilly was a convert to Islam who took the name Mohammad Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed-Alim The court heard he became a Muslim in his mid-teens and that over time he became drawn to violent action and the idea of himself becoming a martyr.

It's well-established that converts are of particular interest to intelligence agencies. Security officials tracking the terror threat say one in ten of those they are concerned with were not born into Muslim families. In Reilly's case, though, it's only part of the story.

That's because, in the words of his defence team, he has "rather simple characteristics." When he was interviewed by police he was treated as a "vulnerable adult." According to his mother he has a mental age of about ten and suffers from Asperger's syndrome.

She believes he had been "brainwashed" into carrying out his attack. Police statements appear to back that up. They say he was "preyed upon, radicalized, and taken advantage of" by extremists in his home town of Plymouth.

Perhaps more worryingly he was also in frequent contact with two individuals over the Internet from whom he received encouragement and information about the attack.

One of the conversations included a discussion about the type of person to be targeted: public servants like the police, or ordinary citizens. In the end, the decision was to target the latter.

Police say they are still trying to trace Reilly's Internet correspondents. It's believed they do not live in Britain.

Reilly will be sentenced next month when the judge will have to weigh the significance of psychological and psychiatric reports promised by the defence. In doing so he will have to decide to what extent violent extremists are now deliberately targeting some of society's most vulnerable individuals to carry out acts of terrorism.

A significant terror trial opened in Manchester this week. Significant because it is the first time anyone in Britain has been brought to trial accused of directing terrorism.

Rangzieb Ahmed (above, left) is the man charged with the offence. He also faces a charge of belonging to Al Qaeda, as does another of his co-accused, Habib Ahmed (above, right).

The court has heard how the two men – who are not related – met up in December 2005 in Dubai, where Rangzieb Ahmed handed over what prosecutors described as a "contacts book for terrorists."

Written in invisible ink in an ordinary diary, the court heard, was a series of phone numbers, including one for Hamza Rabia, described in court as the then number three in Al Qaeda.

The contacts book was uncovered in Habib Ahmed's luggage at Amsterdam's Schipol airport. Agents searched through his bags during a layover on his journey back from Dubai to Manchester.

Neither of the two men has been accused of any particular plot. However it's alleged the Dubai meeting was called after Rangzieb Ahmed was forced to abort some sort of mission.

The court heard he was part of an active three-person cell involved in what was described as "major activity." He had been due to fly on to South Africa when his alleged Al Qaeda commander in Pakistan, Hamza Rabia, was killed and the mission was called off.

Also on trial is Mehreen Haji, the wife of Habib Ahmed. She's charged with funding terrorism by transferring money to her husband while he was on a trip to Pakistan, where he was allegedly attending a training camp.

The jury was told the married couple had connections to radical Islamism and the now-banned group Al Muhajiroun. The group's leader, Omar Bakri Mohammed, officiated at their wedding in June 2001.

All three deny all the charges against them. The trial is expected to last about twelve weeks.

LONDON, England - So there will be a re-trial in the case of the British men accused of plotting to blow up transatlantic airliners. No great surprise. It's true the jury in the first trial could have acquitted all eight defendants, but it's otherwise hard to see how the result of the "airline plot" trial could have been less to the taste of the police, the security services and the government.



An armed British police officer patrols outside Heathrow Airport in August 2006.

Investigators had uncovered martyrdom videos and they knew what the bombs were going to look like. The number two at the Metropolitan Police had even said on the morning of the arrests that what was being planned was "mass murder on an unimagineable scale".



Well, yes it was; three men were found guilty of conspiracy to murder. But on the other hand the single most important "fact" about the "plot," as it was described at the time and as it was put by prosecutors, was that it was all about blowing up planes. Crucially, the "existence" of that particular plot was not established to the satisfaction of the jury.



Recriminations have already started to fly, with many in Britain blaming the United States for wrecking the investigation. The U.S. moved to have a key figure in the alleged plot arrested in Pakistan; this in turn forced the Met police to arrest the men it had under surveillance before it was necessary. And that, so the argument goes, meant the evidence against them was not as strong as it could have been if the police operation had been allowed to continue.

In Walthamstow, home to two of the three guilty men, and where the majority of the arrests two years ago took place, the mood, says one community worker who works to tackle extremism, is hard to measure.

Certainly, the absence of any convictions on the central charge will be grist to the mill for those already signed up to the bin Laden message, that the "war on terror" is in reality a "war on Muslims." They now have another string to their bow. 

More damaging is what it might do to the wider community. This case was seen as crucial to convincing doubters there was a problem of violent extremism in their midst that needed to be addressed. Making that argument has now become far more difficult, says the community worker; there is a risk that people will slip back into disbelief.

It's worth remembering, though, that it's not the job of the criminal justice system to maintain harmonious communal relations, just as it's not the job of a jury to simply follow the wishes of prosecutors. A jury's task is to try a case on the evidence before it. And in the trial that ended on Monday, the jury took a look at the prosecution case and decided it was seriously wanting.