He attracted the attention of Aaron Weisburd on a forum called "Islamic Terrorists", where he initially appeared to be a harmless agitator, "At first I started publishing bits and pieces of what he was doing online for comic relief, and really had no appreciation of where he was headed".
He was well known as someone who could break into a web site and hide files containing al-Qaeda propaganda on these sites (examples of such propaganda include the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi produced film All Is for Allah's Religion, the al-Qaeda Internet magazine Voice of Jihad (Sawt al Jihad), and videos of the beheading of Americans Nick Berg, Jack Hensley and Paul Marshall Johnson, Jr.).
He also mentored other volunteers on the art of computer cracking, both by answering questions on-line and through an al-Ekhlas posting entitled "Seminar on Hacking Websites".
[citation needed] Eventually, Tsouli started posting non-computer related instructional material on-line, including tutorials on making suicide bomb vests and other explosive devices.
"[2] Between April and October 2005, he was contacted by American Ehsanul Sadequee, who sent him a videotape he had made of potential targets including the United States Capitol building, the World Bank, a Masonic temple, and a fuel depot.
Following this, 18-year-old Swedish citizen Mirsad Bektašević, who was one of those responsible for the declaration, travelled to Bosnia where he and Abdulkadir Cesur filmed a video in which they wore ski masks, and, surrounded by weapons and explosives, said that they intended to attack sites in Europe to punish nations with forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He had a flair for marketing, and he had the technical knowledge and skills to be able to place this stuff in areas on the net where it wouldn’t be easily erased, where lots of people could download it, view it and save it."
On 4 July 2007, after two months at trial, Tsouli and his co-defendants Waseem Mughal and Tariq Al-Daour pleaded guilty to "inciting another person to commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the UK which would, if committed in England and Wales, constitute murder" (a crime introduced in the s 59 Terrorism Act 2000) and admitted to conspiring together and with others to defraud banks, credit card companies and charge card companies.