A jury has found four British students guilty of collecting extremist material that prosecutors argued was intended to encourage others to die as terrorist martyrs.
Three students from Bradford University and London schoolboy Mohammed Irfan Raja were caught after Raja left a note for his parents saying he was going to fight abroad.
Raja, 18, had been communicating and exchanging material with the others -- Aitzaz Zafar, 20, Usman Ahmed Malik, 21, and Akbar Butt, 20 -- on the Internet and went to stay with them in northern England in February.
He returned home three days later after a tearful conversation with his parents. They took him to the police.
Police who searched the men's computers found a US military guide giving instructions on how to make explosive devices and a suicide bombing manual downloaded from the Internet, as well as chatroom conversations that encouraged terrorism or martyrdom.
The men denied the charges and insisted they were simply researching Islam.
But a jury found them guilty of possessing articles for terrorist purposes.
Prosecutor Andrew Edis said Raja had planned to attend a training camp in Pakistan after being radicalised through Internet propaganda. But he was not "as firm in his purpose as he hoped he would be" or as the students in Bradford had hoped.
"He had hidden his purpose from his family who were beside themselves when they found out what he had done. They were absolutely beside themselves with worry and fear," Edis said
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