Two Islamic State inspired extremists found guilty of plotting a deadly gun attack on Manchester’s Jewish community have been sentenced to decades in prison.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, were found guilty by a jury at Preston Crown Court in December and have been sentenced to 37 and 26 years respectively for the crime.
They had bought assault rifles, handguns and ammunition for the suicide attack they planned on Jewish targets. They saw any Christian victims “as a bonus”.
Saadaoui’s brother, Bilel Saddaoui, 36, of Fairclough Street, Hindley, Wigan, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about the pair’s terror plans and was sentenced to six years in jail with an additional year on licence.
Greater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Rob Potts said the plan would have resulted in “the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history”.
The consequences of carrying out an attack in a crowded area on the Manchester Jewish community would have been “catastrophic”, he said.
Saadaoui, the former owner of an Italian restaurant in a Norfolk seaside town, “hero-worshipped” Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the Paris attacks of 2015, and wanted to replicate the attacks in which 130 people were killed, the prosecution told Preston Crown Court.
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He sold up, moved north and used part of the proceeds from his house sale to pay €5,000 (£4,400) as an initial payment for four AK-47 assault rifles, two handguns and 1,200 rounds of ammunition as he planned a marauding gun attack in revenge for Israeli attacks on Gaza.
His target was the same area of Manchester where terrorist Jihad al Shamie later stabbed a worshipper to death outside a synagogue on 2 October.
Police were so worried about the threat posed by Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein that they established a huge armed operation to protect an undercover operative as he met with the men to determine what they were planning.
The operation followed them as they twice travelled from Greater Manchester to the White Cliffs National Trust nature reserve near Dover, posing as tourists to observe the security checks at the port below where the weapons were to be imported from France.
Saadaoui conducted a surveillance trip around the area of Manchester he planned to attack with the undercover officer known as “Farouk” and told him he wanted to target schools and gatherings, adding: “Young, old, women, elderly, the whole lot, killing them all.”
He was caught “red-handed” by police following an undercover sting operation as he took delivery of the first shipment of weapons, supplied and deactivated by police, from the boot of a rented Lexus.
Police bodyworn footage showed him running 20 yards across the car park of the Last Drop, a Lancashire spa hotel, before he was grabbed by armed officers and brought to the ground on 8 May last year.
MI5 believe that Saadaoui had previously been in contact with an extremist called Hamid al Masalkhi from Cardiff, who had left Britain to join ISIS in 2013 but later died from cancer, sources say.
The sentencing judge, Mr Justice Wall, said: “I want to commend Farouk. His is a dangerous and difficult job and he undertook it with great skill and patience. He has potentially saved very many lives by risking his own.
“I am not allowed to know his true identity but I hope these remarks will be passed back to him.”
‘Largest and most complex’ counter-terrorism investigation
Saadaoui, a former hotel entertainer originally from Tunisia, married an English woman called Jane and moved to Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, in 2012 and then to Great Yarmouth, where he worked in the shop at the Haven Holiday Park.
He bought the Albatross Restaurant in the seaside town for £25,000 in April 2018 but closed the business four years later, sold his house in Ipswich Road for £169,000 in May 2023 and moved to Wigan with his second wife, Michelle, and two young children.
He worked briefly at a discount store in Wigan called Bonkers Prices, then gave up work, claimed universal credit and regularly posted statements from ISIS on Facebook.
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However, his postings drew the attention of MI5 and on 28 November 2023, they began an investigation, codenamed Operation Catogenic, described by police as the “largest scale and most complex covert counter-terrorism investigation ever conducted in the North West”.
Investigators believe Saadaoui was already preparing to launch an attack. Farouk, the undercover officer, told his bosses he believed Saadaoui would “kill a lot of people” if they did not intervene.
