An al-Qaida-linked bomber who claimed he was unfairly convicted through an “avalanche” of prejudicial media coverage has failed to win a retrial.
The European court of human rights has ruled unanimously that there was no violation of Abdulla Ahmed Ali’s right to a fair trial by the UK’s courts or criminal justice system.
Ali, born in east London, is serving a life sentence at Frankland prison in County Durham. The judge ordered that he serve a minimum of 40 years.
He was arrested in August 2006 along with others and accused of conspiring to cause multiple explosions on transatlantic flights using liquid bombs. In court he was described as the UK ringleader of the plot.
In September 2008 he was found guilty of conspiracy to murder but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the more specific charge of conspiracy to murder by way of detonation of explosive devices on aircraft mid-flight.
There was extensive media publicity of the case, including reporting on material that had never been put before the jury. The Crown Prosecution Service several weeks later announced its intention to seek a retrial, and the reporting ceased.
Ali attempted to stop the retrial on the grounds that the media coverage would prevent him from receiving a fair trial. His objection was turned down. The retrial started in March 2009 and he was convicted in September 2009 of conspiracy to murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Lawyers for Ali had drawn attention to what one judge had described as an “avalanche of objectionable material” and claimed that the labelling of the case as the “airline plot” was hammered into the national consciousness by constant repetition.
But the Strasbourg court noted that the judge in the second trial had checked whether jurors held any “pre-conceived views” and ordered them not to carry out research in already published material.
The ECHR judges also pointed out that there had been a six-month delay before the retrial went ahead. They concluded: “There is nothing in the circumstances of the case to suggest that the jury could not be relied upon to follow the judge’s instructions to try the case only on the evidence heard in court.
“The fact that the jury subsequently handed down differentiated verdicts in respect of the multiple defendants in the retrial proceedings, including three acquittals … supports the trial judge’s conclusion that the jury could be trusted to be discerning and to ignore previous media reports and, consequently, decide the case fairly on the basis of the evidence led in court.”
