A rchive Date
[ 31-07-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Britain ]
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[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8770417/site/newsweek/
Bombers Next Door
Four dead and four others safely in custody, but British police worry this is only the beginning.
By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Aug. 8, 2005 issue - The weird thing was how ordinary they all looked. Each new glimpse of the eight suspected foot soldiers of Al Qaeda last week only underscored the British tabloids' description of them as "the suicide bombers next door." A video recording surfaced showing two of the four July 7 terrorists on a Welsh white-water-rafting holiday, laughing and paddling, hardly a month before they killed themselves and 52 mass-transit riders in London. The same commonplace quality came through in TV coverage of a police raid in London last week as two of the four suspects in the failed July 21 bombings emerged meekly onto the balcony of their North Kensington apartment, unclothed, eyes and noses running from tear gas. A pair of small children toddled out onto another balcony below, visibly thrilled to find a K-9 officer on their doorstep. Nothing about any of the eight men's faces would have drawn a second look on most city streets.
No one doubted there could be more like them. Four of the men blew themselves up, and the other four were run to ground from England to Italy, only eight days after they had fled their dud bombs. The quick arrests, thanks to closed-circuit-TV images and fast police work, were reassuring. But Scotland Yard said it would be foolhardy to suppose that the conspirators behind the attacks intend to stop there. Someone must have recruited, organized and equipped the two terror cells. The bombing suspects mirrored Britain's large immigrant population: East Africans, Pakistanis, a Jamaican, they included a school aide, a business student, a transit worker, a counterman from a family fish-and-chips shop. How many other malcontents might Al Qaeda have already groomed into other sleeper cells? "This is not the B team," said London's top police officer, Sir Ian Blair, of the July 21 bombers before their capture. "These were not amateurs ... They only made one mistake," he added. "We were very, very lucky." London cops were on high alert last Thursday after getting word that more bombings were imminent. When the day passed with many arrests but no attacks, they speculated that their increased visibility might have deterred an attack, said a source close to Scotland Yard.
Investigators have found no hard evidence so far that the members of the July 7 and July 21 cells even knew one another. Presumably the plotters didn't want an investigation of one leading to the other. Three of the July 7 bombers were British natives of Pakistani descent, and all four had spent much of their lives in and around the northern city of Leeds. The July 21 suspects appear to have been children of refugees from the Horn of Africa—Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian—who had lived in England for several years; one had only recently become a British citizen. There were hints last week that London police were chasing a third cell, this one of French-speaking Muslims.
Police have yet to figure out who directed the attacks, though they've publicly blamed Al Qaeda. The inquiry keeps coming back to the gritty London neighborhood of Finsbury Park, home of the North London Central Mosque, where a fiery Egyptian preacher known as Abu Hamza al-Masri was a principal prayer leader from 1996. He had two prosthetic hands and one sightless eye—war wounds from Afghanistan, he told people. Until his removal two years ago, he preached venomously anti-Western sermons to jihad recruits like shoebomber Richard Reid and the convicted 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. Abu Hamza was finally arrested in May 2004 and charged with incitement to murder, along with other offenses.
British and American counterterrorism officials, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the investigation, tell NEWSWEEK they're actively pursuing possible ties between Abu Hamza's followers and the bombings. One name that has resurfaced is that of Richard Reid: he's said to have been acquainted with at least one of the July 21 suspects, an Eritrean named Muktar Said Ibrahim. Another is that of Abu Hamza's top lieutenant, Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British-born ethnic Indian who is wanted in the United States for allegedly trying to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon for his boss. In the days before the July 7 attacks, calls were logged between a phone used by one of the bombers and one that was registered to Aswat.
Counterterrorism officials say Aswat's phone was found in Britain, but two weeks ago Aswat was arrested in Zambia, where he is awaiting extradition—whether to Britain or the United States has yet to be decided.
No one doubted there could be more like them. Four of the men blew themselves up, and the other four were run to ground from England to Italy, only eight days after they had fled their dud bombs. The quick arrests, thanks to closed-circuit-TV images and fast police work, were reassuring.
But Scotland Yard said it would be foolhardy to suppose that the conspirators behind the attacks intend to stop there. Someone must have recruited, organized and equipped the two terror cells. The bombing suspects mirrored Britain's large immigrant population: East Africans, Pakistanis, a Jamaican, they included a school aide, a business student, a transit worker, a counterman from a family fish-and-chips shop. How many other malcontents might Al Qaeda have already groomed into other sleeper cells? "This is not the B team," said London's top police officer, Sir Ian Blair, of the July 21 bombers before their capture. "These were not amateurs ... They only made one mistake," he added. "We were very, very lucky." London cops were on high alert last Thursday after getting word that more bombings were imminent. When the day passed with many arrests but no attacks, they speculated that their increased visibility might have deterred an attack, said a source close to Scotland Yard.
Investigators have found no hard evidence so far that the members of the July 7 and July 21 cells even knew one another. Presumably the plotters didn't want an investigation of one leading to the other. Three of the July 7 bombers were British natives of Pakistani descent, and all four had spent much of their lives in and around the northern city of Leeds. The July 21 suspects appear to have been children of refugees from the Horn of Africa—Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian—who had lived in England for several years; one had only recently become a British citizen. There were hints last week that London police were chasing a third cell, this one of French-speaking Muslims.
Police have yet to figure out who directed the attacks, though they've publicly blamed Al Qaeda. The inquiry keeps coming back to the gritty London neighborhood of Finsbury Park, home of the North London Central Mosque, where a fiery Egyptian preacher known as Abu Hamza al-Masri was a principal prayer leader from 1996. He had two prosthetic hands and one sightless eye—war wounds from Afghanistan, he told people. Until his removal two years ago, he preached venomously anti-Western sermons to jihad recruits like shoebomber Richard Reid and the convicted 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. Abu Hamza was finally arrested in May 2004 and charged with incitement to murder, along with other offenses.
British and American counterterrorism officials, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the investigation, tell NEWSWEEK they're actively pursuing possible ties between Abu Hamza's followers and the bombings. One name that has resurfaced is that of Richard Reid: he's said to have been acquainted with at least one of the July 21 suspects, an Eritrean named Muktar Said Ibrahim. Another is that of Abu Hamza's top lieutenant, Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British-born ethnic Indian who is wanted in the United States for allegedly trying to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon for his boss. In the days before the July 7 attacks, calls were logged between a phone used by one of the bombers and one that was registered to Aswat.
Counterterrorism officials say Aswat's phone was found in Britain, but two weeks ago Aswat was arrested in Zambia, where he is awaiting extradition—whether to Britain or the United States has yet to be decided.
Faisal, an Abu Hamza associate, went to Leeds. (In 2003 a British court convicted him of incitement to murder and sentenced him to nine years in prison.) Around the time of the Iraq invasion, Khan began distancing himself from old friends and hanging out more and more with two of the teenagers he had been mentoring at his gym, Hasib Hussain and Shahzad Tanweer. In November 2004, Tanweer and Khan flew to Pakistan for three months. When they came back, Khan quit his teaching job, moved his family to another town—Aswat's old hometown of Dewsbury, as it happens—and left his wife, an ethnic Indian Muslim, and their infant daughter. Five months later, Khan and friends blew themselves up.
Such drastic withdrawal is actually a common feature of Al Qaeda's recruitment process. Former Saudi intelligence chief (and current ambassador-designate to the United States) Prince Turki al-Faisal, a veteran of the secret war against Al Qaeda, described the routine to NEWSWEEK. By the time the group's enlistment spe-cialists approach a candidate, they have studied him carefully. "Then they approach him," Prince Turki says. "They express admiration for him, and they invite him for tea or coffee." They talk about jihad and praise the ideas of some sheik. "After a few more meetings they will offer to intro-duce him to the sheik. That's when they start putting into his head the idea of being careful and not telling anybody, especially his family." Then comes the turning point: they ask the recruit to prove himself by doing something to incriminate himself.
British police may find their jailed suspects surprisingly eager to talk. People say Qaeda operatives are trained to withstand interrogation. That may be true of the commanders, but Prince Turki says captured foot soldiers tend to open up with little or no coaxing. They want to escape their cultish isolation. "If you show them a little sympathy, they want to come back to the way they were before," he says. "It's as if they were given the chance to come back again as human beings, and many of them jump at that chance." If only they could have made the jump before people were killed.
With Rana Foroohar and Emily Flynn in Leeds and Christopher Dickey in Paris
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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