Health worker guilty of plotting bomb and knife slaughter at his hospital

A RADICALISED hospital worker planned to kill "as many nurses as possible" with a homemade bomb and by launching a knife rampage.

- Paul Jeeves

Mohammad Farooq had been just about to commit the lone wolf attack with a pressure cooker device at St James's, Leeds, but was spotted by a patient who stopped him.

The bomb had been intended to be twice as powerful as the one that killed three people at the Boston Marathon in 2013.

Farooq, 28, had planned to "seek his own martyrdom" in the aftermath of the slaughter by using a fake pistol to incite police to shoot him dead. But yesterday jurors at Sheffield Crown Court convicted him of preparing a terror attack.

They had deliberated for less than two hours.

Target

Farooq had immersed himself in an "extremist Islamic ideology", and wanted to blitz RAF Menwith Hill near Harrogate, North Yorks the US spy base is thought to be a major Islamic State target.

But in two reconnaissance trips he realised that its tight security ruled out an attack so he switched to a less well-protected target, in the early hours of January 20 last year.