Three British men were cleared today of helping to plot the London suicide bombings in July 2005 which killed 52 people.
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 co-ordinated attacks on three underground trains and a bus.
Prosecutors said the three men were friends of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Jermaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain.
The men attended the same Mosque and gym in the tightly-knit town of Beeston, northern England, prosecutors said.
Although they were not directly involved in making the bombs or carrying out the attacks, detectives believed the men had helped plan the attacks.
A jury last year failed to reach a verdict against the men, and today Ali (25), Shakil (32) and Mr Saleem (28) were found not guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions at a retrial at London's Kingston Crown Court.
But Ali and Shakil were convicted of a second charge of conspiracy to attend a place used for terrorist training. Prosecutors said they were planning to go to a camp in Pakistan when police arrested them in March 2007.
The court heard that the investigation into the bombings - the largest ever carried out by London police – discovered links between the men in mobile phone records, fingerprints connecting them to the bomb-factory in Beeston, family videos and surveillance.
Detectives found that about seven months before the bombings, the three men 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 part of preparations for attacks on the capital.
But the defendants argued the trip was to allow Ali to visit his sister and take in some tourist attractions.
The court also heard how 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 introduced two of the bombers and Ali as his daughter's "uncles". 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 bombs themselves.
Mr Saleem said outside Kingston Crown Court he was “totally innocent” and had been prosecuted on the “flimsiest of evidence”.
Agencies