The gifted student jailed for life for trying to assassinate MP Stephen Timms told police she had wanted to die as a martyr after watching more than 100 hours of video sermons from the extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki which she had come upon on the internet.
The Guardian has obtained transcripts of police interviews with Roshonara Choudhry conducted hours after her arrest for stabbing the Labour former minister twice at his constituency surgery in Beckton, east London, in May 2010.
The transcripts give a unique insight into how a young and highly educated Briton came to be convinced by material on the internet that she should throw away her glittering future by attempting to murder Timms.
At the Old Bailey, Choudhry was sentenced to serve a minimum of 15 years. "You intended to kill in a political cause and to strike at those in government by doing so. You did so as a matter of deliberate decision-making, however skewed your reasons, from listening to those Muslims who incite such action on the internet," said the judge, Mr Justice Cooke.
The transcripts show that minutes into the interview she confessed to trying to murder Timms as punishment for his support for the Iraq war.
Asked by stunned detectives why she came to believe this, she told them how she had been learning more about her faith and had chanced upon Awlaki's sermons on YouTube. The video sharing site said it was taking down hundreds of hours of his videos after mounting pressure. Choudhry, 21, told police: "I've been listening to lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki … he's an Islamic scholar. He lives in Yemen".
The sections of her interview where she admits that the cleric inspired her to attempt murder were not produced in court, and are revealed here for the first time. Awlaki, the spiritual leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula, is suspected of being behind the air cargo bomb plot uncovered on Friday and other terrorist plots.
The home secretary, Theresa May, warned that Awlaki's reach was so great that earlier this year one of his operatives was arrested in Britain as he planned a terrorist attack.
The Guardian
