Shoe-bomber Reid ready to plead guilty to all charges, says lawyer

The Briton accused of trying to blow up a transatlantic flight last year with explosives hidden in his shoes intends to plead guilty to all eight outstanding charges against him, his lawyer said last night.

Richard Reid was overpowered by the passengers and crew on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami just before Christmas, when he lit a match and tried to set fire to one of the black trainer shoes he was wearing. The flight was diverted to Boston, where Mr Reid was taken into custody.

In January he was indicted on counts ranging from use of a weapon of mass destruction to attempted murder of the 197 passengers and crew aboard the flight, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Mr Reid originally denied the charges, and his trial had been due to open on 4 November. But he has now changed his mind, apparently because he wanted to avoid the publicity of a trial, and the distress it would cause to his family. Owen Walker, his attorney, said that his client "has no disagreement with the facts asserted in the charges".

Though Mr Reid is not regarded as an important cog in international terrorism, he is believed to have had ties with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida organisation. Though jobless, he had enough money to stay in decent hotels and buy a plane ticket to the US.

Such was the sophistication of the device he tried to detonate that investigators are convinced he was helped by a terrorist bombmaker. Moreover, palm prints and hairs were found on the shoe that did did not belong to Mr Reid.

The son of an English mother and Jamaican father, Mr Reid was born in 1973 in the south-east London suburb of Bromley, and went to a secondary school in Blackheath. He fell into a life of petty crime and in the mid-1990s was jailed for a series of muggings. While in prison he is said to have converted to Islam. Like Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker" of 11 September, who is due to go on trial next June, Mr Reid attended Brixton mosque in south London.

According to the FBI, a search of Mr Reid's e-mail yielded a message to his mother in which he described a duty to "remove the oppressive American forces from the Muslim land ... What I am doing is part of the ongoing war between Islam and disbelief."

In statements to law enforcement officers after his arrest, Reid said he acted because of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan and that he hoped his planned attack would cause Americans to stop traveling, leading to a downturn in the economy, prosecutors said.

Last night, Justice Department officials insisted there was no deal between Mr Reid and the government ­ which may well mean he will not assist prosecutors in their investigation of al-Qa'ida. John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, has described Mr Reid as an "al-Qa'ida-trained terrorist" but declined to say if he had acted alone or on the network's orders.

Mr Reid has lost a string of judicial skirmishes, and seems destined to lose another. The Justice Department said that it would not accede to his request to the court to remove language from two of the charges alleging that he had been trained by al-Qa'ida.

Paul Martinek, editor of Lawyers Weekly USA, called Reid's latest legal move unconventional.

He said: "Without the prosecutors supporting the request I doubt the judge will agree to consider this. You don't normally expect someone who is facing a life sentence to plead out. I guess you have to take his word that he is trying to spare his family."