LONDON — A British man went on trial in London on Tuesday accused of making a roadside bomb that killed a U.S. soldier in Iraq in 2007.
Anis Abid Sardar, a 38-year-old British citizen, is accused of assembling bombs in Syria that were planted on the western outskirts of Baghdad that year.
Prosecutors say one of the devices killed Sgt. 1st Class Randy Johnson of 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment. Johnson, from Washington, D.C., died after his armored vehicle struck a bomb on Sept. 27, 2007. Four other soldiers were injured.
Sardar was arrested last year after his fingerprints were found on bombs recovered in Iraq by U.S. forces. He denies murder, conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause an explosion.
Prosecutor Max Hill told jurors at London’s high-security Woolwich Crown Court that Sardar claimed to have been studying Arabic in Syria in 2007, but “he was without doubt involved in bomb-making, whether in Syria or in neighboring Iraq.”
Police found a bomb-making manual in his London home, and Hill said his fingerprints were found on two bombs, along with those of another man, Sajjad Adnan.
The bomb that killed Johnson had only Adnan’s prints. He was arrested after the bombings and handed over to Iraqi authorities. His current whereabouts are unknown. Prosecutors allege that Adnan and Sardar were working together.
Hill said the trial was unusual because “almost all of the evidence you will hear and see comes from Iraq.”
“The offences, we say, are the most serious imaginable, and the British link is the fact that the defendant, a British citizen, lives and works here,” he said. “For that reason, it is lawful to place him on trial in London.”
