Five British Muslim youths jailed for downloading terrorist propaganda were freed today after a three-judge panel headed by the country's most senior judge overturned their convictions.
The five were jailed last July after being found guilty of possessing articles for terrorism purposes.
Four were students at Bradford University in northern England, and one was an east London schoolboy who briefly ran away from home to meet the others after making their acquaintance on the Internet.
The schoolboy, Irfan Raja, had left a note for his parents saying he would meet them in heaven if not in this world. He was jailed along with students Aitzaz Zafar, Usman Malik, Akber Butt and Awaab Iqbal.
All five were found by a jury to have al-Qaeda propaganda material on their computers.
But the three-judge Court of Appeal panel led by Lord Chief Justice Nicholas Phillips said the jury should have been told that the men would only be guilty of a crime if it were proven that' the material was intended to incite terrorist acts.
"We do not consider that it was made plain to the jury, whether by the prosecution or by the Recorder, that the case that the appellants had to face was that they possessed extremist material for use in the future to incite the commission of terrorist acts," Phillips wrote.
"We doubt whether the evidence supported such a case."
Phillips described the instructions to the jury by the trial judge, one of the top criminal judges in the country Recorder of London Peter Beaumont, as "unsatisfactory".