London - Four men who came to Britain as refugees from strife-torn east Africa were Wednesday given life jail terms for attempting to bomb London's transport system in an "al-Qaeda-inspired" attack that would have caused "mass murder" two weeks after the London suicide bombings of July 7, 2005. At the end of a six-month trial, the judge at Woolwich Crown Court in south London concluded that there was a "clear connection" between the bomb plot of July 21, 2005, which "very nearly succeeded", and the attacks exactly a fortnight before in which 52 underground (Tube) and bus passengers died and more than 700 were injured.
The ruling comes at a time of heightened security in Britain, following the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow at the end of June.
The judge said he had "no doubt" that the two attacks in July 2005 were part of "an al-Qaeda-inspired and controlled sequence of attacks."
The plot to detonate explosives on three Tube trains and a bus, following the exact pattern of the earlier attack, had been a "viable attempt at mass murder."
He said the four men, all refugees from Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, Ethiopia, would each have to spend "a minimum" of 40 years in jail.
"What happened on July 7, 2005, is of considerable relevance to this sentencing," the judge said.
Muktar Said Ibrahim, 29, Yassin Omar, 26, Ramzi Mohammed, 25, and Hussain Osman, 28, had earlier been found guilty of conspiracy to murder.
Two other men, who had denied the charges, face a retrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision on their conviction.
The group had insisted that the home-made explosives, made of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour, were "not real" and their attempt was a "hoax."
But the court ruled that the plot came "very close to succeeding."
"If the detonators had been slightly more powerful, or the hydrogen peroxide slightly more concentrated, then each bomb would have exploded," said the judge.
He added that the plot was "designed for maximum impact" and that the men had carried it out with their "eyes wide open."
Referring to the attacks that had taken place two weeks earlier, the judge said: "After 7/7 each defendant knew exactly what the result would be."
The group had planned a "co-ordinated attack designed to cause death and destruction on the London transport system."
"Exactly two weeks after the terrorist attacks on 7/7 these men targeted the same transport system and tried to cause the same level of death and destruction," the court heard.
"While the implementation of their plan was incompetent, their aim was clear. They wanted to kill and maim on a massive scale," said the prosecution in its summing up.
Ibrahim, on hearing the verdict, shook his head, while Omar, wearing a white Muslim robe, stared at the judge, and Osman was clutching the Koran, reports from court said.
Two other defendants, Manfo Kwaku Asiedu, from Ghana, and Adel Yahya, from Ethiopia, are facing a retrial after the jury failed to reach a decision on their conviction.
The court heard that Ibrahim, the leader of the gang, had travelled to Pakistan in 2004 - at the same time as the two main 7/7 bombing suspects, Mohamemd Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer.
The same explosives had been used by both gangs.
