Man Guilty Of Murder In Ricin Raid

(AP)  A jury found an alleged al Qaeda operative guilty of murdering a policeman who had been attempting to arrest him for a plot to spread the deadly toxin ricin, officials said Wednesday. Eight other suspects were cleared.

Algerian militant Kamel Bourgass was sentenced in June to life in prison, but a judge only lifted reporting restrictions Wednesday, after prosecutors dropped charges against four more suspects whose trial had been due to start soon. A jury last week acquitted four other men alleged to have been involved in the plot.

The charges stemmed from the discovery of traces of the poison ricin in a London apartment in January 2003, a find that sparked fears of an al Qaeda cell with designs to strike in London.

In the end, only one of the nine suspects was convicted.

A jury acquitted four suspects of conspiracy to murder on Friday, and on Wednesday prosecutors dropped charges against four others — three Algerian men and a Libyan.

After the raid on a north London apartment on Jan. 14, 2003, Bourgass went on the run to Manchester, northwest England. He stabbed to death Detective Constable Stephen Oake and knifed three other policemen during a raid on a Manchester property nine days later. He was convicted of Oake's murder, the attempted murder of two other police officers and the wounding of another.

Detectives said Bourgass had been trained in Afghanistan in camps run by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

According to an alleged co-conspirator Mohamed Meguerba, who cooperated with authorities when he was arrested in Algeria, Bourgass had been planning to smear poison on the door handles of cars and buildings in London.

Ricin is one of the most powerful naturally occurring poisons. It has no known vaccine or antidote and kills cells by preventing them from making proteins.

Meguerba is awaiting trial in Algeria for alleged terrorist offenses.

In the London raid, police found recipes and ingredients for poisons including ricin, cyanide and botulinum, and the blueprint for a bomb. Scientists who followed the recipes produced enough ricin and cyanide to kill hundreds of people, prosecutors said.

"These were no playtime recipes," prosecutor Nigel Sweeney said during the trial. "These are recipes that experts give credence to and experiments show work. They are scientifically viable and potentially deadly."

After his murder conviction, Bourgass faced a second trial, alongside four other Algerians, on charges of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to commit a public nuisance with explosives. The jury convicted Bourgass on the explosives charges, but failed to reach a verdict on the murder count. The four others — Mouloud Sihali, 29, David Aissa Khalef, 33, Sidali Feddag, 20, and Mustapha Taleb, 35 — were acquitted of both charges.