Foiled plot

Spain's anti-terrorism court on Monday convicted the 11 men of South Asian origin, most of them Pakistanis, in connection with a plot to stage what would have been the country's first suicide attacks.

National Court judge Javier Gomez Bermudez handed down sentences ranging from eight to 14 years to nine men from Pakistan and two from India.

The leader of the group, Maroof Ahmed Mirza, a 50-year-old Pakistani imam at a Barcelona mosque, was given 10 and a half years. Two other Pakistanis, Shaib Iqbal and Qadeer Malik, received the stiffest terms of 14 years and six months for "belonging to a terrorist group" and for possessing explosives, according to court documents.

The 11 defendants intended "to carry out a violent attack using explosives against the Barcelona Metro, which would have caused many casualties," the ruling stated.

Indictment relied on informant

It also cited a video interview in which a Pakistani Taliban group linked to al-Qaeda, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, claimed it was behind the planned attacks in Spain's second largest city. Police broke up the group last year.

The charges in the case were based on declarations made by an informant who was a member of the suspected Islamist cell and who then became a protected witness.

Ten of the men were arrested in early 2008 in Barcelona during raids in which the police recovered bomb-making equipment. The other man was detained in the Netherlands five months later.

Spain has been actively pursuing Islamist radicals ever since the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people and injured 1,800 others in the country's worst terrorist attack.

gb/dpa/AP/AFP

Editor: Darren Mara