ARBID: JILTED LOVER CLAIMS HER BOYFRIEND COULD HAVE BEEN A TERRORIST
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18 August 2011
now with pix of Arbid
hoax…1
A woman accused of making a hoax bomb threat to get back at her boyfriend told a court she feared he was part of a plot to kill hundreds of passengers on an international flight.
Ahla Arbid, 33, told airport authorities that ex-BBC journalist Hossain Ansari Pour was plotting to bring explosives to the UK, it is alleged.
She claimed they were being smuggled from Iran via Turkey by his new bride Sara Aryan Pour and sparked a major security alert.
Arbid invented the false allegations after learning of his arranged marriage to get back at Mr Ansari Pour, who now works for Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones newswire, it is alleged.
But Arbid hit back at claims she had alerted authorities maliciously and insisted she feared Mr Ansari Pour was plotting a bomb attack on a plane.
She said she had grown suspicious of him after she overheard him say in a series of phone conversations the ‘flight will fall’ and talk of ‘documents’, which she believed was a coded reference for explosive materials.
Arbid said she believed Miss Aryan Pour was going to meet a man called Suleman Mohammed at Ataturk Istanbul airport to exchange the bomb parts.
She said: ‘He [Mr Mohammed] is his [Mr Ansari Pour’s] father’s friend or his colleague who works with him in Tehran he will bring the documents and he will meet Sara in Turkey to give her these documents.
‘I thought maybe they were planning for something, that he would meet her and they would do bomb building to make the flight fall.’
She added that she had heard Mr Ansari Pour talk of a woman by the name of Fatima Ahmed that she believed was a false name Miss Aryan Pour would be travelling under.
‘What made me more suspicious was that the more I asked [to explain himself] him the more angry he got,’ she said.
‘His reaction was suspicious.’
‘Most of the time I was thinking there was nothing and it was only me.
‘I am very suspicious, but sometimes I was thinking ‘What if? What if this is true? What if it not in my mind only?’
‘It was more that nothing was going to happen, but the possibility that something was going to happen was there; that the flight would fall and that there was a plan for it.’
She said she believed Mr Ansari Pour’s views on politics and religion had become ‘extreme’ over the nine months she had known him.
‘For him, anyone different does not deserve to live if he is not Shia-Muslim.
‘He watches a lot of news on TV and when you see explosions in the Far East [sic] he would say if they are Christians they deserve this.
‘He was happy about it.
‘If someone likes these things and supports these things you always think then yes, maybe he can do something like this.’
Asked if she contacted the authorities to cause trouble for Mr Ansari Pour and Miss Aryan Pour she replied: ‘No.’
The court had previously heard the couple had met on an Islamic dating website and agreed to enter into a ‘temporary marriage.’
Mr Ansari Pour told the court his father was a senior lawyer and lecturer in law in Tehran, while he had worked for several well-known news organisations including the BBC, and was now head of Farsi at Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal.
He said he had already been married twice, once in a ‘full’ Islamic marriage, from which he has an 11-year-old daughter, and also in a previous “temporary” marriage, which under Iranian law allows legal sexual relationships on a less formal basis than full marriage.
He said that when he started seeing Arbid, he told her that his parents were looking for a wife for him in a traditional arranged marriage.
The court heard that the couple entered into a sexual relationship, and that Arbid later told the journalist she was pregnant by him, subsequently having an abortion.
Mr Ansari Pour’s parents found him a bride in Iran, and although he was still engaged in his ‘temporary marriage’ to Arbid, he flew to his homeland for a religious wedding ceremony.
He then arranged for his new wife, Sara Aryan Pour, to come to Britain, booking her a flight to London via Turkey on 2 May this year.
Arbid discovered what was happening, and contacted both the British Airports Authority and the authorities in Turkey to tell them that Miss Aryan Pour was carrying an ‘explosive substance’ to give to her husband in London.
Prosecutor Adam King said officers in Turkey questioned Miss Aryan Pour, but released her after realising that the threat was a hoax.
Asked by Mr King whether he in fact had any terrorist sympathies, Mr Ansari Pour said: ‘This would be absolutely ridiculous, to think that.’
Arbid, of (Flat 36) Bilton Towers, Great Cumberland Place, Marylebone, west London, denies communicating false information with intent.
The trial continues.
ENDS
