LONDON, Sept 8: Three men, all presumed to be of Pakistani origin, have been found guilty of a massive conspiracy to murder involving home-made bombs.

Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain’s convictions follow a huge terrorism inquiry, which led to sweeping airport restrictions.

Three of the eight men on trial had pleaded guilty to plotting to cause an explosion, and seven had admitted plotting to cause a public nuisance.

The eighth man, Mohammad Gulzar, was cleared at Woolwich Crown Court.

Prosecutors had said the men planned to smuggle liquid bombs onto jets flying from Heathrow to North America.

The men denied two charges, which have been amended, of conspiracy to murder between January 1 and August 11, 2006.

One specifies the attacks would have involved the detonation of improvised bombs on passenger aircraft.

The three and fellow defendants Ibrahim Savant, Arafat Waheed Khan, Waheed Zaman and Umar Islam also admitted conspiring to cause a public nuisance by making videos threatening bombings.

In their defence, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, and Assad Sarwar, 28, claimed to have planned to record a documentary highlighting injustices against Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon.

Ali said he considered detonating an explosive device at the Houses of Parliament or Heathrow Terminal Three as a publicity stunt protesting against British foreign policy.

And he claimed martyrdom videos recorded by six of the defendants were a hoax to be used as part of an internet documentary

Agencies add: A memory stick owned by one of the suspects held detailed information about flights from London’s Heathrow to US and Canadian cities, most of them departing between Aug and Oct 2006.

A diary taken from Ali, who the prosecution described as the ringleader of the gang, contained what the prosecution said was a blueprint for the complex plot.

The bombs would have been made from liquid explosives based on hydrogen peroxide mixed with an organic component such as tang, a substance used to make soft drinks.

Before the jury reached its verdict after more than 50 hours of deliberation, all of the defendants except Mohammed Gulzar, the one cleared on all counts, had pleaded guilty to distributing Al Qaeda-style videos threatening suicide bomb attacks in Britain.

When the trial began, prosecutors said the plot centred on seven flights from Heathrow’s Terminal 3, each capable of carrying between 241 and 285 passengers.

But recorded conversations between the gang, all aged in their 20s, suggested that other terminals and possibly 18 suicide bombers might have been involved.

US officials had said the carnage would have been as horrific as the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington that killed 3,000 people.