Chemistry teacher jailed for six years for terror offences

Jamshed Javeed was sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court after pleading guilty to two counts of engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts.

Earlier the court was told that Javeed had helped his younger brother, Mohammed, and two other men join the group by providing money for flights as well as clothing and equipment. Mohammed Azzam Javeed is missing, presumed dead, in Syria.

Javeed, 30, prepared to follow them to Syria with another member of the group, Nur Hassan, in November 2013. That month he bought a solar charger at Maplins, travel provisions and flight tickets from Manchester and Istanbul.

His travel plans were thwarted after his family removed his rucksack and passport, which he could not find.

His wife Shamelia, who hid the clothes he had prepared along with his passport, also told him that she was pregnant, telling him in a text, “Jamshed, you refuse to take on board anyone’s opinion unless I’ve got a gun and I’m in Syria”, but he insisted in going nevertheless.

The court was played recordings, made by his sister, of conversations with his family about his plans to go.

listen to ‘Jamshed Javeed: ‘I want to go’’ on audioBoom
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He was arrested two days after the argument, in December 2013, hours before he was due to leave the UK. Police found a rucksack containing £1,490 in cash, thermal gloves and combat-style trousers at his home.

Javeed, who taught secondary pupils chemistry at Sharples High School in Bolton, denied that he was going to fight with Isis. He claimed that he had planned to go to Syria on humanitarian grounds to assist civilians against President Assad, saying that he is not an extremist, and that he has never supported “the aims of Isis as now revealed and understood”.

Charles Bott QC, for Javed, said that the “thoughtful, studious and mild-mannered” teacher was “deeply moved” by images of “extreme suffering” of Syrian people under Assad’s regime, and he “is one of many people who did not know the truth about Isis in the later months of 2013”.

However, Simon Denison QC, prosecuting, told the court that Javeed was planning to take part in action which “would have involved the use of firearms and/or explosives”. Javeed, he continued, planned to “commit multiple acts of murder in guerrilla warfare to advance their [Isis’s] religious or ideological cause”.

However Judge Michael Topolski QC said that he was not satisfied that Javeed had rejected “Isis’s ultimate aims”.

Delivering sentence, he said: “By late summer or early autumn 2013 you had become sufficiently radicalised and committed to a violent jihadist ideology that you were part of a group of young men determined to travel to Syria to join Isis and to fight and die for them.”

listen to ‘Jamshed Javeed: ‘I can’t help it’’ on audioBoom
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Praising the “resolve and courage” of Javeed’s family in their efforts to scupper his plans, the judge added: “So determined were you to go that you ignored the pleas of your wife and parents. Even after they had hidden your passport, you persisted. Even the prospect of becoming a father did not deter you.”

Judge Topolski added: “I find that you were not planning to return to this country … but rather to die, if you could, as a martyr. Whether you believed you were fighting in a just cause is irrelevant. The law is clear – this was terrorism.”

Moazzam Begg, the former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was held in Belmarsh prison last year for charges which were later dropped, said that he had met Javeed in prison. He was one of the “most thoughtful and least dogmatic” prisoners he had encountered, he said.