Four men involved in a plot to bomb London's transport network two weeks after the deadly 2005 attacks in the British capital, lost an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights over claims the police had denied them proper legal advice.
The men were jailed over the attempt to replicate the suicide bombings on London's transport network on July 7, 2005, which left 52 commuters dead. Their al Qaeda-inspired attack failed because the home-made bombs they used did not explode.
Three of the four would-be bombers, Somali nationals Muktah Said Ibrahim, Yassin Hassan Omar and Ramzi Mohammed, argued they had been initially refused access to a lawyer in police interviews after their arrest. They were all jailed in 2007 for at least 40 years.
Briton Ismail Abdurahman, jailed for assisting the plot, incriminated himself in a police interview when he was being questioned as a witness, and he said he should have been arrested and offered legal advice. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2008, cut to eight on appeal.
However, the ECHR rejected their claims, saying their subsequent trials had not been unfairly prejudiced and accepting that at the time police had been acting in a climate where they feared further attacks.
"The Court finds that it has been convincingly established that at the time of the impugned police interviews, there was an exceptionally serious and imminent threat to public safety and that this threat provided compelling reasons which justified the temporary delay of all four applicants' access to lawyers," the judges concluded.
