Skip to main content

Man convicted of driverless car terror plot in UK

A man has been found guilty in a UK court of plotting to use a driverless car for terrorism. Farhad Salah was convicted at Sheffield Crown Court after prosecutors argued that he was planning to put an explosive device in a vehicle which could then be controlled remotely. He will be sentenced on 24 July after the jury found him guilty by a majority of 10 to two. His co-defendant Andy Star was found not guilty of the same offence at the trial. It is the second time that both men, who are Iraqi nationals,
July 16, 2019 Read time: 2 mins

A man has been found guilty in a UK court of plotting to use a driverless car for terrorism.

Farhad Salah was convicted at Sheffield Crown Court after prosecutors argued that he was planning to put an explosive device in a vehicle which could then be controlled remotely.

He will be sentenced on 24 July after the jury found him guilty by a majority of 10 to two.

His co-defendant Andy Star was found not guilty of the same offence at the trial.

It is the second time that both men, who are Iraqi nationals, have been tried on terrorism charges – a different jury was unable to reach a verdict on them last year.

Prosecutors said that Salah sent a Facebook message saying: “My only attempt is to find a way to carry out martyrdom operation with cars without driver.”

Salah (who lived in Sheffield) and Star (who had a chip shop in Chesterfield) were arrested in police raids on their homes in December 2017.

Counter-terrorism police said Salah was a “very real risk to the safety of the public in the UK” but no intended target has been identified.

Related Content

  • Growth of legislation in favour of US enforcement market
    February 1, 2012
    The automated road safety enforcement industry in the United States had a very robust 2010. The industry continued to grow to the point that providers now have nearly 5,000 cameras deployed in 25 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, with more than 650 communities utilising such life-saving technology. Intersection safety cameras are the most common application but more communities are also implementing road safety camera programmes to deter excessive speeding. Deploying cameras to protect children
  • Social media a one-stop shop for travel information
    January 20, 2012
    Exponentially widening mobile phone ownership is opening up the field to new ways of obtaining and disseminating better travel information from and to public transport users, via for example social media and tracking riders' phones. Over 50 US transit agencies, including major actors such as TriMet, in the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon, Dallas Area Rapid Transit in Texas, and San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), as well as smaller operators, now have Facebook and/or Twitter accoun
  • EU rules extend the ‘long arm of the law’
    November 27, 2013
    New EU legislation allows authorities to collect fines from errant foreign motorists even after they have returned to their own country. New European Union legislation means drivers in many Member States can be prosecuted for breaking traffic laws when driving outside their home country. While not all the Member States will not be signing up to Directive 2011/82/EU facilitating the cross-border exchange of information on road safety related traffic offences, for those that do the deadline date to impleme
  • EdgeVis removes bandwidth barriers to mobile streamed video
    October 26, 2017
    A new generation of video compression can lower transmission costs of data and make streaming from mobile and body-worn cameras a reality, as Colin Sowman discovers. Bandwidth limitations have long been the bottleneck restricting the expanded use of video streaming for ITS, monitoring and surveillance purposes. Recent years have seen this countered to some degree by the introduction of ‘edge processing’ whereby ANPR, incident detection and other image processing is moved into (or close to) the camera, so