Justice Four men convicted of terror plot call for case to be reviewed

'It's 40 years since the Birmingham and Guildford pub bombings ... and the question that gets asked [is]: 'Could you imagine this [a police stitch-up] ever happening again?' My reply is that it already has. This is the case in which it happened."

- Haroon Siddique 

The case referred to by Gareth Peirce, who represented the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, was that of four Muslim men, who she is also acting for, jailed for life for planning a terrorist attack on UK soil after an elaborate undercover operation.

In 2016, officers set up a fake delivery company to snare Khobaib Hussain, who, like two others of the so-called Birmingham Four, had a previous terror-related conviction. When, a month after he had been recruited, Operation Pesage had not yielded results, officers recruited his friend, Naweed Ali.

On Ali's first day, MI5 officers, there to place a bug in his car, discovered a bag under the seat containing a "partially constructed" pipe bomb, suspected handgun and meat cleaver with "kafir" scratched on to it.

Ali, Hussain, Mohibur Rahman, and Tahir Aziz were convicted after a 2017 trial. They have just applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in the hope that it will investigate their convictions and ultimately refer them back to the court of appeal.