Racist homophobe David Copeland received six life sentences on 30th June at the Old Bailey after being convicted of carrying out last April's three horrific nail-bombings and the murder of three of his victims. Michael Murphy followed the trial at the UK's principal criminal court.

Mr Sweeney described how Copeland, a London Underground engineer from Sunnybank Road in Cove, acquired his bomb-making expertise from a book called 'The Terrorist Handbook' - a beginner's guide to bomb-making - which he downloaded from a website while surfing at an internet café in Victoria.

Disturbingly, some fourteen months after those tragic events, we were still able to locate the same website and download the 'manual' in its entirety within just three clicks of one of the UK's leading internet search engines.

Armed with his recipe for terror, the court was told how self-confessed racist homophobe Copeland used a local minicab firm to ferry him around on shopping trips from his home to his local branch of B&Q. It was here that he purchased metres of plastic piping and thousands of six-inch nails, in addition to the other materials he would later use to ignite his dangerous cocktail
of ammonium and mercury fulminate.

Seemingly with even greater ease, we then heard how, on a separate expedition, he bought over £1,500 worth of fireworks from a Farnborough joke shop without arousing the slightest suspicion from sales staff.

After the first bombing in Brixton, when CCTV tapes were analysed, Copeland was clearly seen wearing a white baseball cap loitering outside the local Iceland store. Stills from this tape were published in The London Evening Standard two days before the Soho bombing. It led to LT engineer Paul Mifsud recognising the bomber as David Copeland, a work colleague on the Jubilee Line extension. He called the police with his suspicions, but tragically, his call was received only a matter of an hour before Old Compton Street experienced Copeland's third and final outrage.

It was described in court how Copeland had taken this third device to the Vegas Hotel in Victoria, and then to the Admiral Duncan. "I put it down at about 10 to six, sort of in the middle of the pub. I had a drink and I was in the pub for about 25 minutes," Copeland told detectives.

He calmly walked back to Victoria and watched reports of his handiwork on Channel 4 News. He then checked out of his hotel, took a taxi to Waterloo station then a train to Farnborough, before cycling to his home in Cove.

On the third day of the trial, some of those who were terribly injured in the Admiral Duncan blast gave evidence to a silent courtroom. Jurors craned their necks to catch every word from those for whom the horror of that fateful day will be forever etched on their memories. By sheer coincidence, Copeland had a sudden bout of illness that Wednesday morning and his counsel requested that he be excused from attending that day's hearing. Thus Copeland avoided coming face to face with the survivors of his handiwork.

Victims of the Admiral Duncan bombing at the start of last Easter's bank holiday weekend described the scene of devastation created when the explosion ripped through the low ceiling and narrow beams of the Soho pub, spraying nails across the crowded bar.

Blast victim Julian Dykes told the court how the tragedy robbed him of his pregnant wife Andrea and their unborn child. Others attended court to tell of the moment when razor-sharp nails ripped into their arms and legs as the jukebox played Robbie William's song 'Millennium'.

David Williams, a drinker in the pub, told how he had chatted to Copeland at the bar moments before the explosion. He described Copeland as "fidgeting, twitching, and looking around before leaving the pub to get some money".

Describing the moment when the device went off, Williams said: "It was like being dropped in a swimming pool. I wasn't blown off my feet, I was still standing. I went into auto pilot."

John Light's partner, Gary Partridge, said the atmosphere in the pub was happy. In a voice heavy with emotion, he said: "All of a sudden I saw a flashing light... I heard a popping sound, like a champagne cork. I felt my head and covered my face - I didn't really feel any pain."

Partridge told the court how an unnatural calm settled over the debris for a few seconds, before people began to shout and scream: "It was very dark and full of smoke and I was aware of things falling on my head. I could smell burning or singed hair," he told the jury.

Continuing his evidence, he remembered how he saw his lover John being dragged out of the smoking ruins by two men: "At first I thought he had lost a leg, but when I looked again I realised that was because it was so soaked in blood."

In the hushed courtroom, tapes of Copeland's interviews with police were played to the jury. The court heard Copeland try to explain away his actions when he claimed, in a calm, matter-of-fact way: "I'm totally shot away - I'm just weird!"

When pressed by police to explain his hatred of gays, he said: "One, they are a minority. Two, your open groups don't like them anyway. Three, I knew it would piss everybody off, especially Blair and Mandelson and all them lot."

Forensic evidence was then presented which linked fragments found from the three London blasts to materials found by police when they had raided his Hampshire bedsit. They included items and chemicals listed in 'The Terrorists Handbook' that Copeland had downloaded from the net, a copy of which had also been found during the raid. The police had also found press cuttings of his victims pasted to the walls of the bedsit. A full-sized mock-up model of one of Copeland's devastating devices was then shown to the jury.  

More