THE conviction of three men found guilty of planning the bombing of seven trans-Atlantic flights - and attempting to kill 1500 people on the planes they targeted - has uncovered deep schisms between British and American anti-terrorism organisations.
The men, convicted in London's Woolwich Court on Monday, had plotted to smuggle liquid explosives onto the aircraft in softdrink bottles and detonate the home-made bombs simultaneously while the flights were over the Atlantic. Their discovery led to an overhaul of security measures in airports worldwide, including the continuing ban on liquids or gels in aircraft passenger cabins.
The guilty verdicts were the result of two trials and the biggest and most expensive counter-terrorism investigation in British history, with £60 million ($115 million) spent on police and legal costs alone.
Speaking after the verdicts, John McDowall, Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism chief, said: ''Apart from massive loss of life, these attacks would have had enormous worldwide economic and political significance.''
The Obama Administration also praised the verdict but analysts say that behind the scenes the case created major tensions between the US and Britain as security and counter- terrorism forces clashed over methods, surveillance of the suspects and the timing of arrests.
In the London Times, the former Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations with the Metropolitan Police, Andy Hayman, wrote a detailed piece headlined: ''Why I suspect the jittery Americans nearly ruined efforts to foil plot''.
''We believed the Americans had demanded the arrest and we were angry we had not been informed. We were being forced to take action, to arrest a number of suspects which normally would have required days of planning and briefing,'' he wrote.
In The New York Times, ''bitter disputes'' are reported with the Americans reportedly worried the British, who watched the conspirators for months as they plotted and prepared, had moved too slowly and therefore raised the risk of an attack.
The first trial, which revealed the existence of crucial emails that discussed ''dummy runs'', the acquisition of chemicals to manufacture the bombs and a crucial link between the men and their leaders in Pakistan, failed because the correspondence had been found through the use of electronic surveillance, which is not accepted by British courts.
Ultimately the ban on use of the correspondence was circumvented by the British Government, which applied to the US to demand that Yahoo! produce the emails for use in the high-stakes second trial.
The jury found that the three men were guilty of conspiring to kill passengers and crew members aboard the flights. Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, was named as the ringleader and Assad Sarwar, 29, identified at the trial as the ''quartermaster'' of the plot, who bought explosives, detonators and manufacturing equipment used to put them together in a suburban London ''bomb factory''. The third man was a 28-year-old, Tanvir Hussein. All will be sentenced next Monday.
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