Iraqi Convicted of Attempted Murder in London Tube Bombing

LONDON — An Iraqi teenager who arrived in Britain as an asylum-seeker was found guilty Friday of a bombing that sent a fireball through a London subway train last year, a case that raised questions about the country’s anti-radicalization efforts.

A court in London convicted the teenager, Ahmed Hassan, 18, of attempted murder for leaving an explosive device, concealed in a bucket and a supermarket plastic bag, on a train at the Parsons Green Station in west London on Sept. 15.

The explosion at the height of the morning rush and the resulting panic left 30 people injured, some with serious burns, but none were killed.

The bombing was the fifth terrorist attack in Britain last year and the first time the capital’s public transportation network had been targeted since the deadly assaults of July 2005. In response, British officials briefly raised the country’s terrorism threat level to the highest possible level.

Hassan had been identified by authorities as a possible threat before he carried out his attack, and had been referred to a British government counter-extremism program known as Prevent. He was still engaging with the anti-radicalization project as he began preparations for the bombing, officials said.

The device contained 400 grams, or nearly a pound, of high explosives and 2.2 kilograms, or about 5 pounds, of shrapnel, the court was told, but Hassan argued that he was “certain” the bomb would not explode.

Having tested a sample, Hassan said, he thought that the device would “just burn” and that the prospect of killing someone had never crossed his mind.

But during the trial, victims described their hair catching fire and their clothes beginning to melt on their bodies as intense heat consumed the subway car.

Hassan was stopped by the police the day after the attack at the port of Dover. He had been living with foster parents in Surrey, not far from London, and studying at a local college, with ambitions to become a wildlife photographer.

When he arrived in Britain in October 2015, Hassan claimed that he had been forced to train “to kill” by the Islamic State group. During his trial, however, he said that he had never had contact with the group and had made up the story to help with his asylum claim.

Born in Baghdad, Hassan told the court that his mother had died when he was young and that his father, a taxi driver, was killed in an explosion in 2006.

Prosecutors argued that Hassan blamed Western intervention in Iraq for his father’s death, and that anger had motivated the attack. The court heard that Hassan had told one of his lecturers that he believed he had “a duty to hate Britain.”