Tuesday, 25 December 2001 : "shoe bomber"

The man ... is a small-time British criminal who converted to Islam behind bars.

The leader of Brixton Mosque in South London said that Mr Reid was incapable of acting alone and was probably on a test mission for a new terrorist technique...

"He was a testing ground. If he had succeeded they would know this is a mechanism that works. If the plane had exploded there would have been very little trace of how that happened."