Soldiers of Allah Convicted of Murder

A jury on Thursday convicted two men who called themselves “soldiers of Allah” of murdering a British soldier who was run down with a car, stabbed to death and nearly decapitated in a brutal attack on a London street.

The jury of eight women and four men deliberated for just 90 minutes before finding Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale guilty of murdering Fusilier Lee Rigby. They were acquitted of attempting to murder a police officer.

Both men had pleaded not guilty to murder, though neither denied taking part in the May 22 attack.

Neither defendant reacted as the jury foreman announced the verdicts. Adebolajo smiled and kissed a copy of the Quran as he was led down to the cells.

The judge praised the dignity of Rigby’s family “throughout what must have been the most harrowing of evidence.” He thanked jurors, who sat through graphic footage of the murder, for their service.

The judge said he would sentence the defendants next year, after a January Court of Appeal ruling on the use of life sentences without parole.

The 25-year-old Rigby, an Afghan war veteran, was returning on foot to his barracks in south London when he was hit by a car and then stabbed.

Adebolajo was filmed by a passer-by moments after the attack, covered in blood and holding a cleaver and a knife, justifying the killing as revenge for British troops killing people abroad.

“An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” he said repeatedly on the video.

“We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we’ve killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers,” Adebolajo told the camera, according to Reuters. 

Adebolajo later told the police, in an interview played in court, that Rigby had been targeted because “he was the soldier that was spotted first.”

Adebowale chose to present no evidence in his defense during the three-week trial at London’s Central Criminal Court. His lawyer, Abbas Lakha, told the jury that his client agreed with Adebolajo’s description of the attack as a “military operation” and the two men as soldiers.

Adebolajo, who comes from a Christian family and converted to Islam in his teens, was arrested in November 2010 near the Kenya-Somalia border and eventually returned to Britain. Kenyan officials said he intended to join an Islamic militant group in Somalia.

The pair had been radicalized, in part through exposure to firebrand preachers like U.S.-born Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011.