Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul in Breaking Bad. Ali told his contact, in reality an undercover FBI agent, he would pay $500 (£321) for the poison to be delivered ‘Breaking Bad-style’ in five concealed 100mg vials to his home address. Photograph: c.AMC/Everett/Rex
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On the evening of Tuesday 10 February this year, Mohammed Ammer Ali sat down in his computer room to write his daily to-do list. Alongside a reminder to pay the car insurance were the aide memoires: “Get pet to murder” and “Paid ricin guy”.
Hours earlier, his wife had taken delivery of a mystery package that had left her perplexed. It was, the father of two assured her, just a prototype toy car. “Awesome,” he said when she told him about the parcel via Skype. “Just leave it in my room, I’ll figure it out when I get home.”
His wife was not to know that, over the past three weeks, Ali had been secretly messaging a man in the US about purchasing 500mg of ricin – enough to kill 1,400 people without leaving a trace. It had been delivered, as planned, in five 100mg vials hidden in a children’s toy car.
What Ali was not to know, however, was that the seller he knew as “DarkMart” and “Psychochem” was an undercover FBI agent. And the powder concealed in the children’s toy car was not ricin – it was a harmless substance planted by detectives from the UK’s north-west counter-terrorism unit, who were watching his every move.
At 8am the following morning, a dozen police officers dressed from head to toe in protective clothing burst through the front door of the family’s modest flat above the Salt & Pepper restaurant in inner-city Liverpool, arresting a partially-naked Ali.
A series of raids were carried out simultaneously at other addresses across Merseyside. Acting on an FBI tipoff, counter-terror officers moved quickly to thwart what could have been a major bioterrorism case with parallels to the Wood Green ricin plot in 2002.
There was one problem: detectives could find no suggestion that Ali was involved in any terrorism plot.
A quiet family man from Bolton, Ali had worked for his parents’ newsagents business until he got a job as a software programmer for a local company shortly before his arrest. He was computer mad and excelled at school. Following psychological assessments after his arrest, he was diagnosed with showing personality traits associated with Asperger syndrome.
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Vials were delivered hidden in a toy car. Photograph: Greater Manchester police
Far from being a sophisticated criminal mastermind, the 31-year-old had made little attempt to cover his tracks. “When police burst into his bedroom they didn’t even have to crack his computer – it was still switched on with ‘get pet to murder’ written in a word processing document on the screen,” said one prosecuting lawyer.
Moments after his arrest, having been bundled into a police van and made to wear protective clothing, Ali’s first thought was of his family. “Are my kids OK? Is my wife OK as well?” he asked the officers. After being told he was under arrest on suspicion of being involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism, he said: “That’s what I’ve been told.”
He went on to deny having obtained ricin, adding: “I may have, like, sort of, enquired about such a thing but I’ve never … I’ve done a few Google searches and things like that but it wasn’t to harm anybody – like, I wasn’t thinking of harming anybody. I’m not that type of person.”
After five days of police interviews at which Ali answered “no comment” to every question, he was charged with attempting to possess a chemical weapon. The terror offence was dropped due to a lack of evidence.
In the witness box at his Old Bailey trial, Ali said buying the ricin had been a “reckless” thing to do and that he was simply testing whether he could buy items from the dark web. He chose ricin, he told jurors, because he had been watching Breaking Bad and it was the first thing that came to mind. “I was interested in the dark net and ricin. I just wanted to know what the fuss was about,” he told jurors.
Under the Chemical Weapons Act 1996, Ali’s defence was that he attempted to purchase ricin for a “peaceful purpose” – ie as an experiment. It is the same exemption that permits researchers in science, medicine and pharmacology to possess small quantities of deadly toxins.
At the heart of the case was Ali’s encrypted conversations with the undercover FBI agent. Using the moniker “Weirdos 0000”, he approached his seller on the internet black market, Evolution Marketplace, on 11 January: “Hi, would you be able to make me some Ricin and send it to the UK?”
Over the next three weeks, Ali told his man he would pay $500 (£321) for the poison to be delivered “Breaking Bad-style” in five concealed 100mg vials to his home address under a fake name. Future orders would follow if Ali was “happy with the results”, he promised.
Police computer investigators found that on the night Ali’s delivery arrived, he set about finding a pet in the Liverpool area. His Google search history included “chinchillas liverpool”, “animal rescue centre” and “small sized pets”. Further analysis revealed he had researched the merits of various chemicals including abrin, cyanide and hydrogen peroxide over the past four months.
The most alarming internet search took place after Ali’s first message to the undercover FBI agent, when he visited a Yahoo Answers page titled “What poison kills you quick, is foolproof, easily found/made, easily concealed and hard to detect post mortem”.
Was this, the prosecution asked, really compatible with Ali’s claim of having a “peaceful purpose”? But with no sign of a terror plot and little else to go on, jurors had a decision to make: was Ali simply a harmless computer geek? Or, alternatively, had he sought the poison with malign – albeit unknown – intent?
After deliberating for five and a half hours, the jury had failed to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt by the defence case.
