The family that plots together still gets sentenced separately.
A teenager has been found guilty of plotting a terrorist attack in London, making her one of the youngest females to be charged and convicted of terrorism offences in the UK.
Safaa Boular, 18, who was accused of discussing a grenade and gun attack on the British Museum in central London with her Islamic State militant partner, Naweed Hussain, was also found guilty over an earlier attempt to travel to Syria for terrorism.
When she was detained on charges of attempting to travel to Isis-controlled territory in Syria, she passed the plot on to her older sister, Rizlaine Boular, 22.
Safaa Boular, who lived at home with her mother, Mina Dich, 44, in Vauxhall, south-west London, had denied two counts of preparing acts of terrorism.
Her sister had already pleaded guilty to planning a knife attack in London. Dich admitted assisting her, and their family friend Khawla Barghouthi, 21, pleaded guilty to failing to disclose information about an attack….
Boular chatted to Hussain on a secret mobile phone. After Hussain was killed in Syria, she told undercover MI5 officers she planned to carry out his plans for an attack in the UK and join him in martyrdom.
The defense has argued that Boular had been groomed by Hussain. And the evidence for that is pretty straightforward. But she still made her decisions. So did her friends and family members.
The court heard how the 30-year-old Hussain messaged Safaa, then 16, on Instagram. The pair bonded over a shared enthusiasm for British television shows like Deal Or No Deal and The Chase, before having what the teenager considered an online Islamic marriage in 2016.
During the course of their relationship, Safaa and Hussain talked of his-and-hers suicide belts and fantasised about killing former US president Barack Obama.
She communicated with him in her school sixth form lounge and at home in her bedroom and bathroom via encrypted Telegram messages on a secret mobile phone she bought at Brixton market.
During this period he encouraged her to send pictures of her body, sent her explicit photographs of himself and told her to watch “X-rated material”.
In recorded phone conversations, the sisters discussed an attack in coded terms about an Alice in Wonderland-themed Mad Hatter’s tea party, with cucumber sandwiches. Simultaneously, Rizlaine and her mother travelled to various landmarks in London, believed to be a reconnaissance on potential targets. The following day, they went to a supermarket on Wandsworth Road in south London and purchased a packet of kitchen knives and a rucksack.
“This was without doubt a major investigation for the counter-terrorism command working jointly with the security service,” said Dean Haydon, the Met’s senior national coordinator for counter-terrorism.
“Not only because it involved a family with murderous intent, but because it is the first all-female terrorist plot that’s been launched in the UK related to Daesh [Isis].”
Once again, 24 was ahead of its time. But it doubtlessly won't be the last. The irony is that you have a modern European social arrangement, the single mother and her kids, being rolled into a fundamentalist Jihadist plot. And the target was the British Museum.