A jury failed to reach a verdict today in the trial of three Britons accused of helping to plot the deadly London suicide bombings in July 2005, which left 52 dead.
Mohammed Shakil, Sadeer Saleem and Waheed Ali were accused of scouting London for possible targets with two of the four young British Muslims who detonated homemade devices in coordinated attacks on three underground trains and a bus.
However, the jury at Kingston Crown Court failed to reach a verdict on charges of conspiracy to cause explosions.
The three men were friends of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Jermaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain, who they knew from the tightly-knit area of Beeston in Leeds, attending the same Mosque and gym.
Although they were not accused of being directly involved in making the bombs or carrying out the attacks, detectives said the men had shared the same extremist beliefs.
The court heard that police discovered links between the men through mobile phone records, fingerprints connecting them to the bomb-factory in Beeston, family videos and surveillance.
In November 2004, Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 plot, recorded a farewell video for his baby daughter in 2004 before heading off on a mission to Afghanistan where he expected to die, prosecutors said.
In the footage he introduces two of the bombers and Ali as his daughter's "uncles".
The following month, about seven months before the bombings, Shakil, Saleem and Ali spent two days in London with Hussain and Lindsay, visiting tourist attractions such as the London Eye, the Natural History Museum and the London Aquarium.
They also visited locations similar to ones attacked on 7/7 and detectives said the trip, the key element of the prosecution case, was to prepare for attacks on the capital.
The men said the trip was to allow Ali to visit his sister and take in some tourist attractions. Prosecutors said the three men were caught on surveillance footage meeting a "committed terrorist" and the court also heard they had admitted travelling to Pakistan for militant training.
Police have always maintained that the 7/7 bombers had assistance from other people with links to al Qaeda as they would not have had the technical expertise to construct the hydrogen peroxide-based devices themselves.
"There are those who may know a great deal who haven't come forward," a senior police source said, adding some people in Beeston were still remaining tight-lipped meaning there were still gaps in their knowledge.
"There are other people who know things but for a variety of reasons some people are reticent about coming forward."
REUTERS