EON

London – Four men have been found guilty over an extremist Muslim plot to bomb London’s transport network in 2005 – two weeks after the July 7 attacks.

Hussain Osman, 28, Muktar Said Ibrahim, 29, Yassin Omar, 26, and Ramzi Mohammed, 25, were been convicted of conspiracy to murder.

The jury is still considering verdicts on two other men, Manfo Kwaku Asiedu and Adel Yahya.

The gang attempted to detonate hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour bombs covered in shrapnel on London’s transport network on July 21, 2005.

Their plan only failed at the last moment because of problems with the home-made explosives, hot weather, or mere “good fortune”, Woolwich Crown Court heard.

Ibrahim, Omar, Mohammed and Osman had claimed the bombs were fake and just a demonstration against the war in Iraq.

Sky News Correspondent Rachel Younger, at the court, said: “The jury heard from forensic experts that, if those explosives had gone off, the devastation would have been as bad if not worse than 7/7.”

Although the men planned to attack just a fortnight after the “carnage” of July 7 – which left 52 innocent people dead – it was not some “hastily arranged copycat”, the prosecution alleged.

In fact, the plot began nearly a year before.

In 2004, Ibrahim – the cell’s “emir” or leader – travelled to Pakistan to learn how to carry out an atrocity in the UK, just three months after being granted a British passport.

He was there at exactly the same time as July 7 ring leader Mohammed Siddique Khan and his fellow suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer.

Omar’s one-bedroom flat in New Southgate became the “bomb factory” where the men spent hours boiling hydrogen peroxide to make it more readily explosive.

On July 21, Ibrahim, Omar met Mohammed at his flat, rigged-up the devices with a detonator and set off with bombs in rucksacks.