{"id":364400,"date":"2025-12-23T19:52:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T19:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/364400\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T19:52:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T19:52:10","slug":"men-guilty-over-gun-attack-plot-on-manchester-jewish-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/364400\/","title":{"rendered":"Men guilty over gun attack plot on Manchester Jewish community"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laura O’Neill,North Westand<\/p>\n

Lauren Hirst,North West<\/p>\n

\"GMP\/GMP\/ Reuters<\/p>\n

Walid Saadaoui (left) and Amar Hussein (right) arranged for guns to be brought into the UK<\/p>\n

Two men have been found guilty of planning a gun attack to cause “untold harm” to the Jewish community in Manchester.<\/p>\n

Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, had a “visceral dislike” of Jewish people and arranged for guns to be smuggled into the UK as part of an “Isis-inspired plot”, Preston Crown Court heard.<\/p>\n

They believed they were planning the attacks with a third man, known to them as Farouk, who they thought shared their extremist views but was actually an undercover operative.<\/p>\n

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said the main instigator Walid Saadaoui had plotted to carry out what “could potentially have been the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history”.<\/p>\n

Walid Saadaoui, of Abram in Wigan, and Hussein, of no fixed abode, were found guilty of preparing acts of terrorism between 13 December 2023 and 9 May 2024.<\/p>\n

A third man, Saadaoui’s younger brother Bilel Saadaoui, 36, has been convicted of failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism.<\/p>\n

Walid Saadaoui aimed to smuggle four AK-47 assault rifles, two handguns and 900 rounds of ammunition into the UK.<\/p>\n

Months earlier the father-of-two, originally from Tunisia, paid a deposit for the weapons and believed he had arranged for their importation with a like-minded extremist in Farouk, who was an undercover operative.<\/p>\n

He told Farouk he could independently get a firearm via Sweden and indicated he was looking to bring guns from eastern Europe. Separately he had bought an air weapon and had visited a shooting range.<\/p>\n

\"GreaterGreater Manchester Police<\/p>\n

Two assault rifles, a semi-automatic pistol and nearly 200 rounds of ammunition were found in a vehicle when Walid Saadaoui was arrested<\/p>\n

Saadaoui was arrested in a hotel car park in Bolton on 8 May 2024 when he went to collect some of the firearms, which had been deactivated, from the back of a car.<\/p>\n

The prosecution said two assault rifles, a semi-automatic pistol and nearly 200 rounds of ammunition were found in the vehicle.<\/p>\n

But counter-terrorism police said they were in control of the supply and delivery of the weapons in order to protect the public.<\/p>\n

Hussein and Bilel Saadaoui, who were both elsewhere, were arrested minutes later.<\/p>\n

The trial heard Walid Saadaoui had been planning to “martyr himself” in the attack.<\/p>\n

He had prepared a will and had left a copy with his brother, along with access to his belongings and tens of thousands of pounds in cash to help provide for his family.<\/p>\n

\"GMPGMP<\/p>\n

Bilel Saadaoui has been found guilty following a trial <\/p>\n

Walid Saadaoui came to the attention of the authorities when he used 10 Facebook accounts, none of which were in his own name, to spread a torrent of Islamic extremist views.<\/p>\n

Farouk was deployed to gain his trust online and later in person.<\/p>\n

Walid Saadaoui used one of his fake accounts to join the Facebook group of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester which contained details of a “March Against Antisemitism” held in the city centre on January 21 last year which thousands attended.<\/p>\n

Days later he told Farouk: “Here in Manchester, we have the biggest Jewish community.<\/p>\n

“God willing we will degrade and humiliate them (in the worst way possible), and hit them where it hurts.”<\/p>\n

He recruited fellow IS sympathiser Hussein, a Kuwaiti national, who worked and lived at a furniture shop in Bolton, Greater Manchester, to assist his plans.<\/p>\n

The pair travelled to Dover, Kent, in March 2024 to conduct hostile reconnaissance on how a weapon could be smuggled through the port without detection.<\/p>\n

On his return, Walid Saadaoui travelled to Prestwich and Higher Broughton in north Manchester where he carried out similar surveillance on Jewish nurseries, schools, synagogues and shops.<\/p>\n

\"GMPGMP<\/p>\n

Amar Hussein and Walid Saadaoui travelled to Dover in March 2024 to assess how weapons could be smuggled into the UK<\/p>\n

Bilel Saadaoui, of Hindley, Wigan, was not planning to take part in the attacks but knew what his older brother was doing and sympathised with the views of the so-called Islamic State group.<\/p>\n

The trial was shown WhatsApp messages between the pair which “provided a flavour of the views they held about Jewish people”.<\/p>\n

In one message, Bilel Saadaoui sent Hussein a link to a news report that a number of Jewish people had been killed in a bridge collapse, and he added the hashtag “Beloved Palestine”.<\/p>\n

Giving evidence Walid Saadaoui denied he had an extreme ideology and claimed he was “playing along” with Farouk. <\/p>\n

He said his intention was to sabotage the plans before they came to fruition as he aimed to cut up the weapons with an angle grinder and then alert the authorities.<\/p>\n

GMP<\/p>\n

A safe was found hidden in a brickhouse of the back garden at the home of Bilel Saadaoui<\/p>\n

Hussein told detectives he was not part of any terror attack plan and said the evidence of the undercover operative was “fantasy”.<\/p>\n

He also told them: “Your government, your Prime Minister has sent weapons to kill our children in Israel.<\/p>\n

“Terrorism is our religion. Koran say terrorism is normal. We are proud, we say terrorism is proud.”<\/p>\n

His barrister told jurors that Hussein held “very firm opinions” about the conflict in Gaza but that did not make him a terrorist.<\/p>\n

All three defendants will be sentenced on 13 February.<\/p>\n

‘Lethal weaponry’<\/p>\n

Following the verdicts, Assistant Chief Constable of GMP Robert Potts said Walid Saadaou’s plan could “potentially have been the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history”.<\/p>\n

“Some of the things he said made it very clear that he regarded a less sophisticated attack with less lethal weaponry as not being good enough as he saw it as his duty to kill as many Jewish people as he could.”<\/p>\n

Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s special crime and counter-terrorism division, said it “was a deeply disturbing plot inspired by extremist ideology”.<\/p>\n

He said Farouk was deployed as a “highly-trained witness who made sure their plot did not succeed and secured valuable evidence directly from the mouths of the terrorists”.<\/p>\n

Mark Gardner, chief executive of Jewish security charity the Community Security Trust, praised police for scuppering the plans, adding this plot would make people “very, very fearful”.<\/p>\n

He said the plotters simply wanted to kill Jews.<\/p>\n

“They don’t care who those Jews are. They don’t stop to ask these Jews what their opinion is of Israel, or whether they support Manchester United, or anything. <\/p>\n

“They want to kill Jews, end of story. It’s the same as Nazis.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Laura O’Neill,North Westand Lauren Hirst,North West GMP\/ Reuters Walid Saadaoui (left) and Amar Hussein (right) arranged for guns…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-364400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}