STUDENT Erol Incedal was acquitted yesterday of targeting Tony Blair and his wife Cherie Blair as part of a terrorist plot in Britain’s first ever secret terror trial.

The 27-year-old broke down in tears s he was found not guilty after a retrial at the Old Bailey of plotting to attack high-profile individuals or carry out a “Mumbai-style” outrage.

Mr Incedal was convicted last year of possessing a bomb-making manual on a memory card at the time of his arrest in October 2013.

He will be sentenced for that offence next week alongside his co-defendant Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, also 27, from London, who admitted having an identical document.

The hugely controversial decision to hold most of the case behind closed doors is likely to come under increased scrutiny since the jury decided that the sum total of evidence they had heard did not prove the case against Mr Incedal.

Ministers had initially sought to have the entire trial held in secret citing the interests of national security.

But following a legal challenge by the media at the High Court, the case was divided into three parts — a public part, a private part with 10 accredited journalists present but banned from reporting and a completely secret part.

Before then, the public was forbidden from knowing the identities of the accused, referred to only as AB for Mr Incedal and CB for Mr Rarmoul-Bouhadjar.

In the first trial last year, 40 hours of the three-and-a-half week hearing were held in secret, only eight hours with journalists present and 12 hours in public. The retrial followed a similar pattern.