MySpace profile, then on his arrest in April 2008
A former public schoolboy planned a suicide bombing after being radicalised by extremist preachers on the internet.
Andrew 'Isa' Ibrahim, 20, was arrested just 'a matter of hours or days' before he was about to strike at Bristol's biggest shopping centre.
The son of Christian church-going parents converted to Islam after falling under the spell of radicals such as Abu Hamza, Omar Bakri Mohammed and the 7/7 bombers, in speeches recorded on the internet.
He had also become a regular hard-drug user, after first experimenting with cannabis at 12.
Yesterday he was convicted at Winchester Crown Court of making an explosive with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury, and preparation of terrorist acts, and sentenced to at least ten years in jail.
His father Nassif - an Egyptian-born consultant pathologist - mother Victoria, and brother Peter were in court every day and have regularly visited him while he was in prison. Mrs Ibrahim fled the court in tears as the sentence was passed.
Ibrahim made explosives and a suicide vest in his flat and carried out extensive surveillance at Broadmead shopping centre in Bristol, where he planned to cause the maximum damage by using nails and ball bearings in his bomb.
He bought the main components for the suicide bomb from high street shops, including branches of Boots.
It is believed to be the first time that the Muslim community has played a central role in bringing a potential terrorist bomber to justice.
When they entered his flat in April last year, police found between 125-245 grammes of the unstable explosive Hexamethylene Triperoxide Diamine, also known as HMTD, in a Family Circle biscuit tin in Ibrahim's fridge.
He had also made an electrical circuit capable of detonating the explosive at short range and a half-made suicide vest, and filmed himself testing the explosives on the floor of his flat.
Ibrahim made the HMTD, the same substance used in the July 7 attacks, and suicide vest entirely through instructions from the internet.
There was also a large amount of radical literature in the flat and when he was arrested the book Milestones by Sayyid Kutb was in his rucksack. The book advocated jihad and radical Islam.
Ibrahim, from Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol, had denied both charges but pleaded guilty to a third charge of making an explosive substance.
He told the jury he just wanted to set the explosives off and film it for the YouTube website to fill a void in his life because he was lonely and the lost sheep of his family.
Mr Justice Butterfield told Ibrahim that, even though he had not made a detonation device or completed the suicide vest, his preparations for an attack were 'advanced'.
He added: 'You are a dangerous young man, well capable of acting on the views you held in the spring of 2008.'
After the verdict the Crown Prosecution Service Counter Terrorism lawyer Moira Macmillan said: 'The device that Ibrahim was making was viable and he had taken steps to make it even more destructive by acquiring ball bearings and airgun pellets.
'He had identified a target. Had he carried out the attack he had been preparing, serious civilian casualties would have been inevitable.'
More details emerged yesterday of his journey from public schoolboy to potential suicide bomber.
Brought up in a £1million gated mansion in the leafy Bristol suburb of Frenchay, Andrew Ibrahim seemed set for a prosperous life like his elder brother, Peter, 27, who went to Oxford University and is now an IT software engineer.
But his unruly behaviour, and developing drug habit began to take their toll.
Ibrahim was first expelled from £19,065-a-year Colston's School for smacking girls on the bottom. He was then thrown out of the £9,885-a-year Queen Elizabeth Hospital school in Bristol aged 12 for smoking cannabis.
He moved to writer Auberon Waugh's former school - the £24,141-a-year strict Roman Catholic Downside School in Bath as a boarder, but was expelled for drinking alcohol in the dorm and going missing. He ended up at the then £7,500-a-year Bristol Cathedral School, where he passed nine GCSEs with good grades.
By now Ibrahim, who converted to Islam at 16, was using harder drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine.
His parents found him a rented flat in Bristol, but he let another drug addict move in, and the pair sold the property's entire contents. During this period Ibrahim received three warnings from the police - two for shoplifting in autumn 2006, and one for possession of heroin in May 2006.
When the lease on the flat ran out Ibrahim declared himself homeless and became a Big Issue seller outside Broadmead Shopping Centre.
He moved into a hostel a month later. Shortly after moving to the hostel, in 2007, he began wearing traditional Islamic dress and changed his name from Andrew to Isa by deed-poll.
Still using drugs, Ibrahim returned to full-time education and started studying for A-Levels at the City of Bristol College, where a visiting lecturer reported him to the college after Ibrahim asked her what kind of biological weapons could be used to kill people.
His parents were still trying to help their son by buying him food and clothes, while his father would drive him to mosques in the city in an attempt to support his decision to convert to Islam.
Investigating officer Detective Superintendent Nigel Rock, deputy head of CID at Avon and Somerset police, said: 'He might have had an argument with his Mum and Dad, there seems to be a watershed where he had dabbled and had a look at things on the internet, to where it suddenly rises sharply after Christmas.'
He watched videos made by suicide bombers repeatedly, which he had downloaded to his mobile phone, and made his vest and the HMTD.
The night before his arrest last year Ibrahim had gone to his father's house to get ball bearings to use as shrapnel.
When police entered his flat, they found the vest hanging on the back of his bedroom door.
Last night Det Spt Rock said: 'He had all he needed, all he had to do was put it together.
'It could have been a matter of hours, it could have been a matter of days, but it was going to happen soon.'
He added: 'We cannot underestimate the significance the internet had on motivating and instructing Ibrahim in the last few months before his arrest.
'The internet had a massive influence on Ibrahim. He had been an educated and intelligent teenager, but was radicalised by preachers on the internet such as Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza.'
Source: Mail Online
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