Wood Green ricin plot
The Wood Green ricin plot was an alleged bioterrorism plot to attack the London Underground with ricin poison. The Metropolitan Police Service arrested six suspects on 5 January 2003, with one more arrested two days later. Within two days, the Biological Weapon Identification Group at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in Porton Down were sure that there was no trace of ricin on any of the articles that were found. This fact was initially misreported to other government departments as well as to the public, who only became aware of this in 2005. Reporting restrictions  were in place before the public's perceptions could be corrected. The only subsequent conviction was of Kamel Bourgass, sentenced to 17 years imprisonment for conspiring "together with other persons unknown to commit public nuisance by the use of poisons and/or explosives to cause disruption, fear or injury" on the basis of five pages of his hand-written notes on how to make ricin, cyanide and botulinum. Bourgass had already been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of detective Stephen Oake, whom he stabbed to death during his arrest in Manchester. Bourgass also stabbed three other police officers in  that incident; they all survived. All other suspects were either released without charge, acquitted, or had their trials abandoned. Bourgass had attended meetings of "Al-Muhajiroun" leading up to the plot. Public reaction. Physicians throughout the United Kingdom were warned to watch for signs that patients had been poisoned by ricin, and the public health director for London urged the public not to be alarmed following some media reports. Britain's largest circulation tabloid newspaper, "The Sun", reported the discovery of a "factory of death", and other newspapers warned on their front pages "250,000 of us could have died", "Poison  gang on the loose" and "Killer with no antidote". The fact that no ricin had been found was known to some government departments very early on, but this information was not revealed to the public until after Bourgass's trial two years later, although in the interim it was cited as evidence for further terrorism laws, as well as featuring in US Secretary of State Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 speech to the UN to build the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as part of the alleged Abu Musab al-Zarqawi global terrorist network. As late as  February 2006, Chancellor Gordon Brown described it as a significant terrorism plot spanning 26 countries. Trials. On 30 June 2004, Kamel Bourgass was convicted for the murder of DC Stephen Oake during his arrest and was jailed for life with a minimum tariff of 22 years. During periods of his imprisonment, Bourgass has been placed in segregation after he was accused by prison authorities of involvement in attacks on other prisoners and attempts to force other inmates to convert to Islam. The trials of five defendants, including Bourgass, for conspiracy to commit murder and as part of a ricin plot , began in September and lasted until 8 April 2005. Bourgass alone was convicted and sentenced to 17 years for conspiring to cause a public nuisance by "plotting to spread ricin and other poisons on the UK's streets". Mouloud Sihali and David Khalef are convicted of possessing false passports. On 12 April 2005 the jury was dismissed after failing to reach a verdict on the charge of conspiring to commit murder, and a second trial of four further defendants was abandoned before it started. There had been a blanket ban on the media reporting on anything involving the Bourgass case  for two years until the trial had ended. In October 2005, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Director General of MI5, revealed that the evidence which uncovered the so-called ricin plot came from Mohamed Meguerba, a man who jumped bail and fled to Algeria where he was detained and probably subjected to torture. Criticisms. On 13 April 2005, Jon Silverman, a legal affairs correspondent for the BBC wrote: [I]s this case... notable for the way in which criminal investigations are shamelessly exploited for political purposes by governments in the UK and United States, whether to justify the invasion of Iraq or  the introduction of new legislation to restrict civil liberties? A key unexplained issue is why the Porton Down laboratory, which analysed the material and equipment seized from a flat in Wood Green, said that a residue of ricin had been found when it had not. On 11 April 2005, George Smith, of GlobalSecurity.org summed up: It is no longer a surprise when one finds that many claims from the alleged best of American government intelligence in the war on terror are bogus. It is still dismaying, though, to see intelligence derived from materials submitted in the alleged trial of the  UK poison cell that is so patently rotten. Who was informing Colin Powell on the nonsense before his date with the UN Security Council? There was no UK poison cell linked to al Qaida or Muhamad al Zarqawi. There was no ricin with which to poison London, only notes and 22 castor seeds . There was no one who even knew how to purify ricin. On 17 August 2006, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray summed up: I spoke at the annual Stop the War conference a couple of months ago [and] referred to the famous ricin plot... It was  alleged that a flat in North London inhabited by Muslims was a "Ricin" factory, manufacturing the deadly toxin which could kill "hundreds of thousands of people". Police tipped off the authorities that traces of ricin had been discovered. In the end, all those accused were found not guilty by the court. The "traces of ricin" were revealed to be the atmospheric norm. The "intelligence" on that plot had been extracted under torture in Algeria. Another police tip-off to the media was that the intelligence said that the ricin had been stored in plastic jars, and they had indeed found  plastic jars containing a suspicious substance. It turned out the containers in question were two Brylcreem tubs. What was in them? In the first, paper clips. In the second, Brylcreem. The Wood Green conspiracy allegations were also depicted critically in the 2007 documentary "Taking Liberties".