LONDON: The jury in a mostly secret terrorism trial in which the defendant had been accused of possibly targeting former Prime Minister Tony Blair has been discharged after failing to agree on a verdict, prosecutors said yesterday.
A retrial is due to take place next year.
Erol Incedal, 26, was arrested in October last year with another man, Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadja, who last month admitted possessing a bomb-making document on a memory card.
Incedal, who lives in London and is a British citizen, had denied charges of preparing for acts of terrorism with unnamed others abroad and possessing information useful to terrorism.
The Old Bailey had heard Incedal was accused of preparing to attack either a limited number of individuals, an individual of significance or a more wide-ranging and indiscriminate assault such as that in Mumbai (India) in 2008.
A piece of paper with the address of a property owned by Blair had been found in Incedal’s black Mercedes when it was stopped for a traffic offence in September 2013.
Blair, 61, who has a house in central London, was prime minister from 1997 to 2007, during which Britain joined the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had originally asked for Incedal’s trial to be held entirely in secret on national security grounds — a request unprecedented in recent British legal history.
Reuters
