Patient’s kindness averts terror attack as hospital worker jailed for 37 years

A FORMER hospital worker was jailed for 37 years last Friday (21) after a patient talked him out of detonating a homemade pressure cooker bomb in a maternity ward.

Prosecutors said Mohammad Farooq was a “self-radicalised lone wolf terrorist” inspired by Daesh (the Islamic State group).

Farooq had planned to “kill as many nurses as possible” when he took the explosive device into St James’s Hospital in Leeds in January 2023, prosecutors added.

But the 29-year-old “lost his bottle” after Nathan Newby – a patient who was smoking a cigarette outside the hospital – calmed him down, the judge said during Farooq’s sentencing at Sheffield crown court last Friday.

Farooq was found guilty last year of preparing acts of terrorism. He admitted firearms offences, possessing an explosive substance with intent and having a document likely to be useful to a person preparing or committing an act of terrorism.

Prosecutors said he had modelled the explosive device on those used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, but had intended his one to be twice as powerful.

It was made using 13.7kg (30 lbs) of low-explosive mixture and a length of fuse, they said. Sheffield crown court heard that Farooq had targeted the hospital after failing to get into an American base at the nearby RAF Menwith Hill air force station, which housed US and UK staff.

Farooq did not give evidence during his trial, but his lawyers said he was motivated by grievances with colleagues rather than ideology.

The court heard he had planned to use a bomb threat to evacuate part of the hospital and attack fleeing workers with knives, before brandishing a fake gun to provoke police to shoot him dead.

Judge Bobbie CheemaGrubb handed Farooq a life sentence and said he would serve a minimum of 37 years behind bars.

“Your responsibility is not reduced by the fact that you lost your bottle and were persuaded, while in emotional turmoil, to stand down and let Mr Newby call the police. The kind thoughtfulness of a passing stranger saved you and those you targeted,” she said.

Newby, the judge said, was “an extraordinary, ordinary man whose decency and kindness on January 20 2023 prevented an atrocity in a maternity wing of a major British hospital”.