article: It has been a long and controversial journey that began with Abid Naseer's radicalisation in Pakistan and ends in a maximum security prison in the US. But although MI5 and police in Britain have been vindicated by the verdict in a Brooklyn federal court, this is a case which has raised a number of uncomfortable questions. Why was Naseer not tried in the UK? This would clearly have been the preferred route given that Naseer, a Pakistani citizen in the UK on a student visa, was accused of plotting to blow up people on the streets of a British city. However, despite carrying out one of the largest ever counter-terrorism investigations - involving the surveillance of a dozen suspects, the Crown Prosecution Service said there was not enough evidence to put any of the men on trial. There were emails between Naseer and a suspected al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan - allegedly coded discussions about a possible imminent attack on the city centre. But crucially no explosives or chemicals were found and no gathering of ingredients to make bombs. The authorities felt they could not risk running the surveillance operation any longer. Police were forced to move in more quickly than planned when secret operational details written on papers held by a senior detective were photographed as he was entering 10 Downing Street for a briefing. A subsequent report by Lord Carlile, then the government's Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, found this would not have affected the issue of the evidence - but it criticised the lack of co-ordination between the police and the CPS during the investigation. Why was Naseer extradited to the US? This is one of a number of cases where critics suggest Britain is effectively sub-contracting difficult legal cases to the US - where juries are much more likely to convict terror suspects. After the decision not to charge Naseer, the Home Office attempted to deport him to Pakistan, along with those other arrested men who had not voluntarily returned there. But the High Court blocked it because of the risk he would be mistreated. At the same time they concluded Naseer was "an al-Qaeda operative who posed and still poses a serious threat to the national security of the United Kingdom". So the UK authorities could not put him on trial, could not deport him and did not want him left free to roam the streets. He spent a brief time on a control order but the dilemma was only resolved when US prosecutors announced they wanted to try Naseer in New York and he was extradited from the UK. They said - and the jury has now agreed - that he was part of a wider al-Qaeda conspiracy to attack Britain, America and Norway. Lord Carlile told the BBC: "In every case you have to find where the most convenient forum is for the trial. That will depend on where the evidence lies. "If the evidence lies in the United States, particularly the key evidence, then one would expect the trial to be in the United States."
summary: Nearly six years after MI5 and armed police dramatically disrupted an al-Qaeda plot to launch suicide attacks on shoppers in Manchester, the ringleader has finally been convicted.