What terrifying terrorist act a seemingly mild-mannered dental student intended to carry out we may never know.

Counter Terrorism Police wisely decided they could wait no longer after they were tipped off that Mohammed Abbas Idris Awan, 24, had had 500 ball bearings and a catapult delivered to his family home in the nondescript surroundings of Rudding Street, Crosland Moor.

The police were right to take no chances in June this year and blew the front door off its hinges.

Awan’s older brother Rizwan had blown himself up in a suicide bomb attack in Mosul, Iraq, in March last year on behalf of Islamic State and had, according to reports, taken over a dozen lives with him.

One resident at the time of the Rudding Street police operation described how “his house shook” following the blast.

A thorough search of Awan’s Sheffield home revealed a horrifying arsenal of Jihadi material including Commander Hamzah Zinjibary’s Training Camp video which an official at Sheffield Crown Court, where Awan’s trial was held, begged journalists not to watch fearing its traumatic effects.

Prosecutor Simon Davis had earlier told jurors that its contents were brutal and graphic, showing as it did how to behead and much more in a similar vein.

Awan was not at all intimidated by his surroundings and almost seemed to relish his moment in the limelight.

Despite a potentially long jail sentence hanging over him he gave a highly composed and articulate performance.

The seized ballbearings

Like a boxer in the ring he danced around the prosecution evidence and it seemed uncertain at times whether the Crown would be able to prove its case.

But, ultimately, the jury saw through his defence that he had ordered the ball bearings because he was a keen fisherman and game hunter interested only in killing rabbits.

They preferred Mr Davis’s version that as well as polishing teeth here was a dangerous, radicalised young man who had been polishing his knowledge on the internet on how to maim and kill human beings in cold blood.

Awan got sucked in to his older brother’s Islamic State vision which ended in his own tragic death and has now destroyed his own very promising career.

Awan will be sentenced by a judge at Sheffield Crown Court next Wednesday.