Two brothers have been sentenced to a total of 76 years in prison by an Australian court for planning to blow up an Etihad Airways flight from Sydney to Abu Dhabi with a bomb hidden in a meat grinder. The plot was foiled with Israeli help in the form of intelligence provided by an elite military unit.
The New South Wales Supreme Court on Tuesday sentenced Khaled Khayat to 40 years in prison with no parole until 2047. His brother, Mahmoud Khayat, was sentenced to 36 years with no possibility of parole until 2044.
The two Australian-Lebanese men had been found guilty of planning two terrorist attacks: the bomb and a chemical gas attack on the flight to Abu Dhabi in July 2017.
Khaled was found guilty by the New South Wales Supreme Court in May, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict against Mahmoud. His retrial also ended with a guilty verdict in September.
Khaled and Mahmoud Khayat were arrested after police raids in Sydney. Police had said that high-grade explosives used to make the bomb were flown from Turkey as part of a plot "inspired and directed" by the Islamic State.
The brothers were planning to hand a bomb disguised as a meat grinder to a third brother, Amer, as he was about to board an Etihad Airways jet. A fourth brother, a member of the Islamic State group, is said to have overseen the plot from abroad, with the bomb components and assembly instructions provided by the terror group.
The bag with the IED, however, never left the airport because Amer had been asked to re-package his luggage, prompting Khaled to abort the attack, as the risk of detection was too high. After the first plot failed, the two brothers reportedly began planning a poison gas attack.
The plane bomb plot was also reportedly part of a family feud, with three brothers outraged over the behavior of the unwitting fourth brother, whom they deemed expendable.
According to the judge, Amer's homosexuality prompted his siblings to plant the bomb on him.
The two plotters were eventually arrested due to a tip-off from Israel. The IDF later revealed that the crucial intelligence information came from its secretive Unit 8200, an elite high-tech division within Military Intelligence that deals with electronic communications and signals intelligence