Student guilty of plotting suicide bombing

LONDON (Reuters) - A British Muslim convert was jailed for at least 10 years on Friday for plotting to blow up a shopping centre using his own homemade "suicide vest."

Isa Ibrahim, 20, a student from Bristol in southwest England, was arrested in April last year after police received what they described as a "landmark" tip-off from a member of the local Muslim community.

During a search of his home, police found a quantity of hexamethylene triperoxide diamine -- a high explosive that can be made from household ingredients and the same substance as used in the deadly London suicide bomb attacks of July 7, 2005.

Also found in his one-bedroom apartment was an electrical circuit capable of detonating the explosive as well as a half-made suicide vest.

Detectives said his intended target was a busy shopping centre in Bristol.

"You were, in my judgement, a lonely and angry young person at the time of these events, with a craving for attention," said the judge, Justice Neil Butterfield, giving him an indeterminate jail sentence with a minimum of 10 years.

"You are a dangerous young man, well capable of acting on the views you held in the spring of 2008."

Winchester Crown Court heard the former private schoolboy turned to religion after being addicted to drugs and spent several months researching Islamist extremism on the Internet, including the motivation behind suicide attacks.

He also used the Internet to find instructions on how to make explosives from household products.