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Prosecutors know using an informer is risky so they will watch closely what happens when Badat gives evidence in the US
The decision to do a deal with a man who had plotted to blow up an airliner with a shoe bomb is a high-risk strategy for British prosecutors. Deals with supergrasses can too often end in tears but the calculation may well be that, on this occasion, it is worth the risk.
It has only just emerged that Saajid Muhammad Badat, who was jailed in 2005 for being part of a conspiracy to blow up a plane, had his sentence reduced from 13 to 11 years in exchange for giving evidence against other alleged terrorists in the United States. This represents a change in strategy for the Crown Prosecution Service but one that its head of counter-terrorism, Sue Hemming, clearly feels is worth the risk. As a result of it, Badat will give evidence in a trial that opens in the US next week, in which the defendant, Adis Medunjanin, is accused of an al-Qaida plot.
This is the first time a terrorist convicted in the UK has agreed to give evidence abroad against his alleged former associates. "Badat has helped with investigations in this country," said Hemming. "He continues to co-operate and has agreed to testify in other trials if called upon."
What is intriguing about the deal is that Badat has agreed to give evidence for such a small discount in his sentence. A couple of years off a 13-year term seems a small reward for bearing witness in an alleged "martyrdom" case, because to do so puts Badat at risk for the rest of his life. He will need to be protected for ever from any reprisals aimed at him by the unforgiving al-Qaida.
The risk for the prosecution service is of a different nature. If Badat's evidence helps to secure a conviction, it could well encourage others in British jails for terrorist offences to follow the same path. Many of those who are serving much longer sentences than Badat's – he received a shorter term because he pulled out of the plot and pleaded guilty – may now be wondering whether all the heady promises of martyrdom are worth the decades of boredom in a British jail. But if Badat's testimony cuts little ice in court, it could, once again, serve to discredit the supergrass system.
It is 40 years now since the British justice system discovered what, at the time, seemed to be the intoxicating benefits of the supergrass. In 1972, a north London armed robber called Bertie Smalls was granted immunity from prosecution by the director of public prosecutions, in exchange for giving evidence against 27 of his former associates, who were duly jailed for a total of 315 years. In the years following this prime example of what became known as "talk and walk", dozens of other villains felt free to break the old criminal eleventh commandment of "thou shalt not grass".
The system spread to Northern Ireland, at that time in the midst of the Troubles, where again it seemed to solve the problems of breaking down the walls of silence surrounding the paramilitary groups on both sides of the divide. The IRA supergrass Christopher Black helped to jail 22 of his former associates and, until the mid-1980s, it was a major tool in the prosecutor's kit. But the system fell into disrepute and dozens of defendants who had been convicted on the word of "paid perjurors", as they became known, were released. It had become all too clear that some supergrasses were using the trials to settle old grudges or simply as get-out-of-jail-free cards.
The supergrass did not reappear in terrorist trials in Northern Ireland until a few months ago, when two loyalist paramilitaries, Ian and Robert Stewart, gave evidence against 13 defendants in a trial in Belfast. Only one of the 13 was convicted in February after the trial judge had dismissed the Stewart brothers' evidence as "infected with lies". The collapse of the case, following a 21-week trial, dealt a heavy blow to the notion that the word of a former terrorist can be believed when he is giving evidence against his old comrades.
Prosecutors on both sides of the Atlantic will be watching with interest how Badat performs. He is an intelligent young man, a Gloucester grammar schoolboy, who looked set for a university career before he took the al-Qaida route. What happens to him and his evidence could either help to reinstate the supergrass system in terrorist cases or relegate it once again to the judicial sidelines.
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