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LONDON (AP) — A British man went on trial in London on Tuesday accused of making a roadside bomb that killed a U.S. soldier in Iraq in 2007.
Prosecutors say Anis Abid Sardar, a 38-year-old British citizen, assembled bombs in Syria that were planted on the western outskirts of Baghdad that year.
They say one of the devices killed Sgt. 1st Class Randy Johnson of 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment. Johnson, from Washington, D.C., died after his armored vehicle struck a bomb on Sept. 27, 2007. Four other soldiers were injured.
"These were anti-personnel devices, large bombs made with the deliberate aim of causing maximum damage, injury and loss of life," prosecutor Max Hill said.
Sardar was arrested last year after his fingerprints were found on bombs recovered in Iraq by U.S. forces, flown to the United States and analyzed in an FBI lab.
He denies murder, conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause an explosion.
Hill told jurors at London's high-security Woolwich Crown Court that Sardar claimed to have been studying Arabic in Syria in 2007, but "he was without doubt involved in bomb-making, whether in Syria or in neighboring Iraq."
Police found a bomb-making manual in his London home, and Hill said his fingerprints were found on two bombs recovered from the same area of Iraq, along with those of another man, Sajjad Adnan.
The bomb that killed Johnson had only Adnan's prints. He was arrested after the bombings and handed over to Iraqi authorities, and his current whereabouts are unknown. Prosecutors allege that Adnan and Sardar worked together on the group of bombs planted near Baghdad.
Hill told jurors that the trial was unusual because "almost all of the evidence you will hear and see comes from Iraq."
"The offences, we say, are the most serious imaginable, and the British link is the fact that the defendant, a British citizen, lives and works here," he said. "For that reason, it is lawful to place him on trial in London."
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