A Glasgow college student who was jailed for eight years for terror offences walked free today.
Mohammed Atif Siddique, who had been dubbed a “wannabe suicide bomber”, had his most serious conviction quashed by appeal court judges.
Members of his family wept and hugged each other outside court moments after the ruling was made.
Siddique had been the first person to be convicted in Scotland of Islamist terror charges. That was in October 2007.
But last month three senior judges said Siddique suffered a miscarriage of justice after the trial judge misdirected the jury.
And today, at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh, they formally overturned the most serious conviction, which earned him six years of his sentence.
The Crown said it did not intend to seek a fresh prosecution against the 24-year-old, of Alva, Clackmannanshire, who has spent nearly four years in custody.
Siddique’s convictions on two lesser terrorism charges were not affected by today’s judgment and he has served his sentence for them.
Derek Ogg QC, for the Crown, had told the court that, after “careful consideration”, they had decided not to seek a retrial.
The shopkeeper’s son was a student at Glasgow’s Metropolitan College when he was arrested at Glasgow Airport in April 2006 while waiting for a flight to Lahore in Pakistan.
His flight tickets and laptop were seized and a police team later carried out a dawn raid on his home.
His trial was told Siddique sympathised with al Qaeda. Hundreds of inflammatory documents were found on his computers.
He was convicted after a four-week trial of two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000, one under the Terrorism Act 2006 and a breach of the peace.
He was found guilty under the main terror charge of possessing articles that gave rise to a reasonable suspicion that they were for “a purposes connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism”.
He was also convicted of a breach of the peace by showing his fellow students pictures of beheadings and by threatening to become a suicide bomber in Glasgow.
Another charge involved setting up websites providing instructions on how to make or use firearms and explosives, while a fourth conviction centred on the distribution of terrorist publications via the websites.
Siddique said he was not a terrorist but someone with a general interest in the motives of terrorists who had carried out research on the subject.
An appeal against conviction was held last year, in which his lawyers argued that much of the material in his possession, which helped secure his conviction, was widely available on the internet. Lord Osborne, sitting with Lords Reed and Clarke, last month agreed the computing student’s conviction on the main terror charge “amounts to a miscarriage of justice”.
Today they formally overturned his conviction on the most serious charge.
