ADVERTISEMENTA court in the UK has heard a man charged with terrorism offences may have been planning an attack on former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Erol Incedal, 26, was arrested in October 2013 alongside Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadja, who has admitted possessing a bomb-making document on a memory card.
Prosecutor Richard Whittam told a jury at the Old Bailey court that the accused had originally been stopped for a traffic offence in September 2013.
“In the car, a black Mercedes, detectives found a piece of paper with the address of former Prime Minister Tony Blair written on it,” he said. “In the context of this case as a whole you may think it has some significance.”
Incedal is being tried on charges of preparing for acts of terrorism contrary to the 2006 Terrorism Act and collecting information useful to terrorism. He is expected to deny the charges in a trial so sensitive it will be heard in three parts: some open to public and press; some only to ten journalists; and the rest in secret.
In an unprecedented move in modern British legal history, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had originally asked for the case to be heard entirely in secret on the grounds of national security. However, the Court of Appeal turned down this request in June 2014.
“The acts of terrorism that they were preparing for were either against a limited number of individuals, an individual of significance or a more wide-ranging and indiscriminate attack such as the one in Mumbai in 2008,” Whittam told the court.
During the Mumbai attacks, 10 Pakistanis killed 166 people in one of the world’s biggest cities, blockading landmarks such as the Taj Mahal hotel for three days.