7/7 Bombing Co-Conspirator Freed by US after Serving Four Years

Mohammed Junaid Babar, an American jihadist who set up the terrorist training camp where the leader of the 2005 London suicide bombers were groomed to manufacture explosives, has been quietly released after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence, the UK Guardian reports.

The US commuted Barbar’s sentence to “time served” because of what a New York judge described as “exceptional co-operation” that began even before his arrest. It is this element of cooperation “prior to arrest” that now raises suspicion in the US Patriot and Libertarian wings of the conservative Republican Party that Babar was a US government operative working with instructions to train terrorists who would eventually execute the July 7 train and bus bombings. Fifty-two people were killed and 784 injured on July 7, 2005 when four suicide bombers detonated rucksacks filled with explosives and nails on London’s transport system in the morning rush hour.

Court documents in Barbar’s case reveal that in December 2010, some six years after his initial arrest and subsequent guilty plea, the American was sentenced to “time served” and charged $500 by the court in a “special assessment” fee. The document also reveals that Babar had by then spent just over four years in some form of prison and more than two years free on bail. Lawyers representing the families of victims and survivors of the attacks have compared the lenient treatment of Babar to the controversial release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.