‘My blood is boiling, brother’: the foiled plot to massacre Jews on streets of Greater Manchester

When Walid Saadaoui recruited Amar Hussein to join him in a pogrom on the streets of Greater Manchester , Hussein wept with joy. Surveillance photo of Walid Saadaoui (left) meeting Amar Hussein in a car park.Photograph: Greater Manchester police Left to right: Amar Hussein, Bilel Saadaoui and Walid Saadaoui.Composite: Greater Manchester police Weapons seized during the arrest of Walid Saadaoui.Photograph: Greater Manchester police Hussein (left) and Saadaoui on a reconnaissance trip to observe the port at Dover.Photograph: Greater Manchester police A safe found buried inside a shed during the arrests.Photograph: Greater Manchester police For years, the two men had been sleeper agents for the Islamic State terrorist group. Each had lived quietly in Britain for years, waiting for the right moment to stage an attack, and for the right person to give them the support to make it happen. Now, finally, it seemed that “zero hour” - as they called it - had arrived. They planned to disguise themselves as Jews to infiltrate a march against antisemitism in Manchester city centre, before opening fire on the crowd with assault rifles. The pair hoped to throw emergency services into chaos by paying people to make 999 calls across Greater Manchester, allowing them to slip away and continue their attack in the suburbs at the centre of the region’s Jewish community. Saadaoui also planned to attack Christians, saying: “God willing ... after we finish with the Jews ... we move on to the crusaders.” It would have been, according to senior detectives, the worst terrorist attack the UK had ever seen. Both men envisaged being “martyred”, but neither reckoned with the prospect that a man they believed to be a crucial player in their plot could be a counter-terrorism undercover operative (UCO). Because of the courage of the UCO, known as “Farouk”, Saadaoui was captured in the final stages of preparation in a hotel car park, while Hussein was arrested at the shop where he worked. A prosecution source said of Saadaoui, the prime mover: “This was a man who was quite prepared to go out and kill children and leave his own in the process.” They added: “At one point he says: ‘You know, if we have an AK-47 left over, I will leave it for my son - so he can do what I do when he grows up.’” The disturbing mindset and tactics of the secret IS network of “lone wolves” and sympathisers were revealed in unprecedented detail in a forensic prosecution case laid out in a three month trial at Preston crown court. Now that Saadaoui, 38, and Hussein, 52, have been convicted of preparing for acts of terrorism, and Saadaoui’s younger brother Bilel Saadaoui has been convicted of failing to report them, the full story of the plot can be told. A personable man who doted on his pet birds On the surface, nothing about Saadaoui, a father of two, suggested he was an extremist who, in his own words, believed Adolf Hitler should be “exulted”. Originally...

Preview: ~500 words