Life sentence for Barot
Updated on 07 November 2006
A British al-Qaida terrorist gets 40 years jail for plotting explosions in the UK and US.
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Dhiren Barot, 34, was sentenced by a London court after pleading guilty last month to conspiracy to murder.
He had plotted to blow up the New York Stock Exchange and carry out attacks in Britain with gas-filled limousines and a "dirty bomb" and was sentenced to a minimum of 40 years in jail.
Barot, a Muslim convert, was accused of plotting to blow up the headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange, Citigroup, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Prudential in New York, Washington and Newark, New Jersey.
Prosecutors said Barot also planned attacks in Britain including detonating at least one "dirty bomb" laced with radiological material.
Edmund Lawson QC, for the Crown, told Barot's sentencing hearing at Woolwich Crown Court in London of his plot for death and carnage.
"The central plan was for the construction and deployment in a basement car park underneath a building of an improvised explosive device using gas cylinders hidden in limousines," he said.
The court heard that Barot's research took an entire year to complete.
In the document, he wrote that the primary objective of the gas limos project was to "inflict mass damage and chaos".
Gas had been chosen, Barot said, because it was not easy to obtain common explosives in the western world and it could cause "large scale damage to structures" as it was both extremely flammable and explosive.
In the document, Barot considered different types of gases including propane, butane, acetylene, oxygen, hydrogen and methane.
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