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Focus special: The bombs Three cities, four killers , and London: one was home to Britain's first suicide bombers; another introduced them to radical ; the third was the target of their murderous hatred. Between them lies the key to an atrocity

Jason Burke in Lahore, Antony Barnett, Martin Bright, Mark Townsend, Tariq Panja and Tony Thompson The Observer, Sunday 17 July 2005

Around the airport at Lahore, the straight roads laid out by British colonial administrators stretch between neat, whitewashed houses, villas, dusty parks and narrow canals. But in the centre of the city, ragged children run through narrow lanes between high, mouldering tenements, hawkers shout for custom and the stalls selling kebabs and curries are thronged in the evening when the temperature begins to dip. The cluttered skyline is full of wires carrying stolen electricity, peeling billboards and the minarets and loudspeakers of thousands of mosques. This city in western is the entry point for many young British Pakistanis. The

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vast proportion of the Pakistani community in Britain is descended from migrants coming from the rich, fertile farm land around Lahore or from the Himalayan foothills to the north.

Many passengers step on to the packed flights from London or Manchester dressed in jeans and T-shirts but walk through the crowded concourse at their destination in the traditional shalwar kameez, the loose cut trousers and shirt favoured locally. Most are coming to stay with their family, looking to learn about the culture, language, society and, often, the religion of their forebears. But a tiny minority come with other plans.

Often already interested in the more militant strands of Islam, some of these arrivals from the UK are hoping to find the men whose messages of anger and hate have formed their vision of the world. Some even are hoping to seek out the men who can help them achieve their ambition to take part in jihad, holy war.

Some of these young radicals come from Britain's northern cities where large Muslim populations often live isolated and battling with poverty. One of the cities is Leeds, four thousand miles away from Lahore. Here, in the back-to-back terraced streets where the Asian community is concentrated, young men and women grow up caught between two cultures. Often speaking both Urdu and English, most successfully reconcile two lifestyles. A tiny minority do not.

Lahore and Leeds have become now become linked by four names: , , Hasib Hussain and Jermaine Lindsay, also known as Lindsay Jamal. These four men strapped bombs to their backs and brought terror to the heart of London ten days ago. Three had been to Pakistan. All had been to or lived in Leeds. Everyone thought they were ordinary.

And all are now the central characters in a story that has left feelings of shock and

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confusion and a simple desire to try, somehow amid the debris of destroyed lives, to learn why and how these four men became the first suicide bombers to attack in Britain.

Chapter 1: Football and fighting

Hasib Hussain lay sprawled upon the short grass of Cross Flatt's Park, the ribbon of green that borders the red-bricked houses of Beeston. It was four days before the London bombings and the 18-year-old was enjoying a final reefer with childhood friends. As another long summer night in Leeds dissolved into darkness, Hussain betrayed none of the radicalism that would shortly immortalise the teenager as the youngest suicide bomber to strike western Europe.

Instead the patter never strayed from the norm: who was going out with whom, who was driving what, who'd found a job. 'When you grow up with someone and smoke weed with them it normally means you're close,' said a lifelong friend of Hussain last Thursday night.

On the balmy July evenings before the London bombings, the young men of Beeston had gathered on its narrow streets to trade exaggerated tales involving their preoccupation with fast cars, football, fighting and 'fit' women. Hussain and one of his closest pals, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, seemed normal in every respect, their street credentials enhanced by the fact that both could 'handle themselves'.

The imposing frame of Hussain had been toughened by his time at the nearby Matthew Murray High School which is described by those who shared a classroom 'as a violent place, where police were often called. The fights were always between whites and Asians.' Tanweer too could fight his way out of trouble if required. A boxing fanatic, his hero was Mike Tyson.

Another of the London bombers, 19-year-old Jermaine Lindsay, would also develop a

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fanaticism with fighting, eschewing the boxing clubs of West Yorkshire in favour of the region's underground fight clubs.

Certainly for Hussain and Tanweer, there was no overnight transformation in their personalities, no single catalyst. The men appear to have adopted a steadily escalating brand of fundamentalism that reached its tipping point at the end of last year and became steadily more radical during 2005 as they drew up plans to murder as many Londoners as possible.

Their evolution from ordinary men to international terrorists can be traced to Mohammad Sidique Khan, the oldest of those who ten days ago brought carnage to the capital. Few men were more popular on the streets of Beeston than the 30-year-old family man. Recognised by his sensible sweaters and neat, coiffeured hairstyle, Khan's respectability peaked nine months ago when he visited Parliament as the guest of a local MP. There he was praised for his teaching work. Even now, those who hang about Cross Flatt's Park describe him as their mentor. He remains the man who coaxed them back into the education system; the bloke who took them on canoeing and camping trips to the nearby Yorkshire Dales; the man who bought them 'loads of extra bullets' when he took them paint-balling. Hussain and Tanweer were among those who idolised Khan from his days as a youth worker in Beeston when he had nurtured their love of cricket and football.

Yet last summer Khan changed. It was following his final trip to Pakistan. Those who knew him had detected a mood change. Two months after he visited the Commons last October, Khan resigned as a popular teaching assistant at the Hillside Primary School in Leeds. In the same period, Tanweer too was undergoing a profound personal transformation. Last December, he met militant groups linked to al-Qaeda north of Lahore. Days after returning to Beeston, a man he met was arrested for an attack in 2002 on an church near a US embassy.

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It was during this period that clerics in south Leeds also detected the first signs of a growing radicalisation in Hussain. Despite his age Hussain had travelled extensively to increase his understanding of Islam, visiting both Pakistan and also making five trips to , twice for the pilgrimage and three times to visit the holy city of Umra.

But for all the visits to Pakistan and to the holy sites of the Middle East, what was it in these young men and where they grew up that turned them into killers? Experts are now examining the role of vibrant homegrown Islam movements in creating suicide bombers. Among those is the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. According to friends of Hussain and Tanweer, Hizb had targeted the Muslim youth of Beeston and its mosques. Although its message is non-violent, critics have warned its teachings can act as an intellectual conveyor belt that can carry believers towards other forms of Islam that condone violence such as al-Muhajiroun, supposedly disbanded nine months ago but still active in Britain. One British would-be suicide bomber from Derby who attempted to blow up a Tel Aviv pub two years is reported to have graduated from reading Hizb literature.

Certainly, Hussain's generation would have been seduced by its rejection of orthodoxy such as long beards while tolerating contemporary pastimes such as football. Hizb targeted students at Leeds' two universities. Khan studied at the University of Leeds and Tanweer, who attended the city's Metropolitan University, would know about the movement even though it had been banned from union buildings. Religious advisors in Leeds had repeatedly warned the academic establishments that Hizb was a problem. As recently as last November, a national Hizb spokesman met with officials from the student union of the University of Leeds in an attempt to lift its ban.

Other potential influences concern the Iqra Islamic bookshop in Beeston where Khan, Hussain and Tanweer were regular visitors. The store closed suddenly two months ago when its owner returned to Pakistan for family reasons. Officers are today examining its

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literature for clues to the precise ideology that may have inspired the London bombs.

Whatever fundamental strain of Islam guided Britain's suicide bombers, by January this year concern was mounting in the Muslim communities around Beeston that Khan, Hussain and Tanweer were going too far. Just before Khan resigned from his teaching job, elders from Beeston's Stratford Street mosque told them that their 'inappropriate teachings' had no place in the prayerhouses of south Leeds.

With their increasingly fundamental brand of Islam message estranging them from the region's network of mosques, Khan used his youth worker connections to secure use of an annex of the nearby government-funded Hamara Healthy Living Centre where Hussain and Tanweer played football.

Here, in a cramped upstairs room sandwiched between a Chicken Delight and an electrician's just ten minutes walk from the family homes of Tanweer, Hussain and the former home of Khan, the London bomb plot was hatched over a period of six months. Lindsay, who by this stage had moved from Huddersfield - a 20-minute drive from Beeston - to Buckinghamshire was kept in the loop through late-night mobile phone calls.

A sense of disaffection may have further bonded the group at this stage. Far from the preconception that those who commit terrorist acts are often privileged, the suicide bombers lived in humdrum terracing with their career prospects already in decline.

Khan, who had devoted his life to helping others, was trying to raise a family on just £17,000 a year and had regularly voiced his disquiet over the squalor that characterises his native Beeston. But that was nothing compared to the fury he felt over Britain's foreign policy which he interpreted as an overt onslaught against the Muslim world.

An attack on 7 July would have been decided months ago. The start of the G8 Summit in

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Gleneagles representing a chance in a lifetime for Khan and his men to strike the capital. Never again would a day return when London's intelligence would be so obviously distracted; when it was known that so many tactical resources had been moved north along with huge numbers of Metropolitan Police.

During the spring it is thought that Lindsay made several trips to London from his Aylesbury home, catching the Thameslink from nearby Luton into Kings Cross. Back in Beeston, tube maps were being scrutinised. Bringing maximum disruption to the capital would involve four men fanning out north, south, east and west along the London tube grid. Indeed, the first claim of responsibility described how the atrocity aimed to stamp a 'burning cross' on the capital.

In July, Khan, Hussain and Tanweer hired the Nissan Micra that would take them south. As dawn broke over Beeston on 7 July the three left Leeds for the last time.

Chapter 2: The police close in

The call came at twenty minutes past 10pm on Thursday evening. It lasted for less than ten minutes, but the short conversation between a worried mother from Leeds and an officer from the Police Casualty Bureau was to be the catalyst for an astonishing new line of investigation. It was just over 12 hours after a bomb on the number 30 bus had exploded in Tavistock Square, ripping its roof off like a sardine tin, murdering 13 people and maiming dozens of others.

Like many of the thousands of calls received by the bureau, the woman from Yorkshire was alarmed that her 18-year-old son was missing. She told the officer on the other end of the line her son had travelled to London with some friends on Wednesday. The mother had been desperately trying to call her son's mobile telephone, but there had been no answer. The officer who took her call asked for his name and to describe her

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son.

He had been wearing a dark anorak and dark trousers just like thousands of other teenagers on the way to the capital. He was carrying a rucksack. A police liaison officer was sent to see the family and the mother handed over a picture of her ordinary looking son. Yet the very ordinariness of his appearance disguised his extraordinary and evil intentions. His name was Hasib Hussain.

The following day, as the sun shone on a dazed and defiant London, forensic teams at the blast sites of the two Circle Line tubes at and Aldgate East, were making some progress. Many had been on their hands and knees, conducting a painstaking search of the wreckage. They had been sifting through minute fragments of material and had begun discovering papers identifying various people who had died.

While the official line coming out of police press conferences was that the attacks were unlikely to involved suicide bombers, investigators were working on another theory. Experts were looking for injuries that would suggest the victim had exploded the device himself. Explosive analysts in have found the suicide bomber is normally decapitated.

As the police began to piece together the identities of the dead, none of the names appeared on security watch lists of radical Islamists. Yet as the forensic team sifted through credit cards and driving licences, police were looking for potential Arabic or Pakistani names. Two stood out: Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. It did not take long to establish that these two were both from the same area of Leeds. But the question had to be answered: were they innocent victims on a daytrip to the capital or perpetrators of the biggest mass murder on mainland Britain?

They turned to grainy images taken by closed-circuit television, often of poor quality

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which makes it very difficult for officers to identify individuals who do not wish to be recognised.

Officers combing through the thousands of hours of film taken by CCTV were focusing on footage taken from cameras around Kings Cross. It had quickly become clear that this station was critical to the investigation because of the timing of the explosions. On Saturday, detectives had confirmed that the three tube bombs had been detonated within 50 seconds of each other with the No 30 bus being bombed 57 minutes later, suggesting there had been been at least four bombers. Investigators were looking for film of young men of Asian or Arabic origin who were carrying shoulder bags or rucksacks.

It was around 8pm on Monday that officers found what they had been searching for. Four men with large rucksacks on their back were standing outside the King's Cross Thameslink station chatting together. At 8.30am they separated.

One person who has seen the image said: 'It was like the infantry going to war, or like they were going on a hiking holiday.' When one of the men was identified as Hussain, it was action stations.

Officers from MI5 and the anti-terrorist squad were scrambled to Leeds. They were after Hussain and the two other names whose credit cards and documents they had found scattered around the tube bombings. A operation was instigated on a number of properties associated with the three identified men. At 6.30am on Tuesday morning anti-terrorist officers and army bomb disposal units swooped on four addresses in Leeds and two in Dewsbury.

As the raids continued, more evidence was uncovered. Statements from friends and neighbours of the bombers suggested that a house in Stratford Street was used to hold

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mysterious meetings after midnight. Yet most attention focused on a flat in Alexandra Grove in the Burley area of Leeds. The rented home was empty but was in the name of Dr Magdy El-Nashar, an Egyptian chemistry student who completed his doctorate at Leeds University and knew at least one of the bombers. Three days before the bombing, this devout Muslim travelled to Egypt. Security sources immediately declared they wanted to interview el-Nashar, though there is no evidence he had any knowledge of the terrorist plot.

Large amounts of bomb making equipment was found in the bath at the address. Its nickname is the Mother of Satan: its chemical name is triacetone triperoxide also known by the abbreviation TATP. The reference to hell is apt: the compound is know for its extreme volatility and its devastating ability to blow apart human bodies as if they were made of paper. It has been a favourite explosive for Islamic terrorists from Israel, Iraq to Afghanistan where al-Qaeda training camps taught recruits to manufacture the lethal chemical. It is so volatile that several bombmakers have been killed by accidental explosions that can be triggered by the slightest shock or rise in temperature. Experts believe that it was mixed with a chemical ingredient known as PETN to stabilise it before it was packed into crude 10lb devices and placed in the rucksacks used by the London bombers.

Not only is TATP relatively easy to make from commercially available household products such as drain-cleaner, it is difficult for bomb-sniffing dogs to detect. The shoe-bomber, Richard Reid, the Briton who tried to blow up an airliner in December 2001, used TATP for his device. The chemical was found in the heel of Reid's black basketball shoes.

Police raiding the bomb-making factory in Leeds discovered 22lb of TATP in the bath, but believe much more was made and are desperately trying to account for the rest of this lethal compound. Some was found 166 miles south in the boot of a red Fiat parked

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at Luton station.

The trail that led investigators south came as police began closing in on the identity of the fourth suicide bomber responsible for the bloodiest of the attacks at Kings Cross. Such was the devastation caused by the explosion in the rat-infested deep tunnels of the Piccadilly Line that identifying any of the victims in the intense underground heat has been immensely difficult.

Yet on Tuesday US law enforcement officials revealed that the terrorist's name was Jermaine Lindsay, a 19-year-old Jamaican convert who was also known as Lindsay Jamal. He is also understood to have changed it to Abdullah Shaheed Jamal when he converted to Islam at 14 while at school in Huddersfield. Jamal, which means 'beauty' in Arabic, is believed to have been a friend of el-Nashar and prayed at the Grand Mosque in Burley opposite the house used as a bomb-making factory.

He is understood to have met other members of the bombing team in Pakistan. Three weeks before the bombing Jamal had moved into a rented redbrick semi-detached house in Aylesbury with his family - his pregnant English wife and his one-year-old son Abdullah. One neighbour said: 'He was very religious. Whenever he was in public he'd be discussing scriptures. He was very intense.'

Despite the outward appearance of a loving family, on the morning of 7 July Jamal left home at around 7am, climbed into his red Fiat and decided he would never see his wife and child again. His three accomplices were making their way south down the M1. It is not known exactly when the four terrorists met, but CCTV footage showing the bus bomber, Hasib Hussain, carrying a large rucksack, places him in Luton at 7.20am on the morning of the bombings. It is believed that it was at this stage the group of bombers synchronised their watches and prayed together before heading off on a commuter Thameslink train.

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As more pieces of the jigsaw of the terrorist operation began falling into place, security sources began hunting a mysterious fifth man who may have been the mastermind. The view was that the group of 'clean skins', with no previous known links to terrorists, would have needed a controller. Suspicions grew that the fifth man was a known al-Qaeda operator who had arrived in Britain a few weeks before the bombing on a cross-channel ferry into Felixstowe.

The individual, whose name is on a terror suspect list, flew out of the UK only two days before the London bombing.

Chapter 3: The Pakistan connection

The office is grey and slightly run-down, set back off a busy thoroughfare on the outskirts of Rawalpindi, the seething city in the centre of Pakistan's northern plains. Half obscured by the exhaust pouring from the rickshaws and painted trucks idling in the traffic jams, a board outside proclaims that it is the home of a government survey organisation. But actually it is the headquarters of the ISI, Pakistan's shadowy, and sometimes infamous, military security agency. It is from the grey corridors of this building that the search for the London bomber's Pakistan connection is being run.

The trail from London and Leeds to Pakistan is a tortuous one but investigators have begun to piece together clues that connect the London bombing to the fragmented helix of different and constantly mutating radical Islamic groups in Pakistan.

It has now been established that Tanweer made at least two trips, each of around two months, to Pakistan, The first was in 2003, during which the 22-year-old visited family in the eastern city of Lahore and in , an industrial town further south. Though Pakistani officials say they are still unable to describe his movements with any precision, a series of militants in prison have revealed important information. One senior militant

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recently jailed for an attack on a church that killed two Americans has said that he met Tanweer in a mosque in Faisalabad that year. This seemed to confirm that Tanweer, and perhaps other bombers too, were connected to a strain of militancy which already had British links.

Britons have been involved in the various groups in Pakistan, many of which have tacit government support, since the early Nineties. A list of 100 suspects drawn up by MI5 two years ago featured at least 40 British-Pakistanis who had been involved in the 'jihad' in the contested Himalayan state of Kashmir. In the later 90s many of the Kashmiri groups established links with the Taliban in Afghanistan and provided some manpower for them. Some groups were connected to the Taliban by the particular ultra- conservative strand of conservative Islam, known as Deobandism, that they followed. In late 2001 The Observer found several British names on a list of fighters enlisted in one such organisation in a training camp near Kabul. Many such groups were based in and around Faisalabad.

The militant Tanweer had met in 2003 was a senior figure in the Jaish-e-Mohammed (Militia of Mohammed) group. The group was formed in 1999, primarily to fight in Kashmir, but swiftly developed links with international militants with a global agenda. It came to world attention when a British-Pakistani, raised in east London and educated at a private school and the London School of Economics, was charged and convicted of kidnapping and murdering an American journalist in 2002.

A second report strengthened the suspected connection of Tanweer to the Deobandi militants in Pakistan. Intelligence officials have told The Observer that, during his second stay in the country from December 2004 to February 2005, Tanweer stayed in the western city of Lahore but left the city to spend a week at the complex run by Lashkar e Taiba, another Deobandi group committed to combat in Kashmir and linked to a number of suicide attacks. The complex is in a village called Muridke. It is here that

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crucial planning meetings may have taken place, security officials believe, though officials at the complex denied any visits by Tanweer and any link to violence this weekend..

Senior sources in Pakistan and in the USA have told The Observer that the 'working theory' involves a far wider network in southwest Asia with links to Britain. 'It looks like we are talking about a group of young men from Britain who were already radicalised who got in touch with groups in Pakistan,' said one intelligence source. 'It's a long chain of personal and organisational associations but that is how modern militancy works.'

A key part of that chain may be three figures, two in prison in western Pakistan, the other in Qatar, the tiny American-allied Gulf state. The first is a young Briton who was arrested in May in a small town in western Pakistan on terrorist charges and was interrogated again last week.

The second figure is a computer expert arrested last year who gave investigators a wide range of international leads. The third is Abu Farraj al-Liby, a senior al-Qaeda militant, who was arrested recently in Pakistan and handed over to the Americans. The Observer has learned that he pulled from his prison cell in a secret American facility in Qatar last week and questioned last week by US officials about the London bombs. Sources differ over his possible role. Shaukat Sultan, a major-general in the Pakistani army, said that al-Liby was only responsible for operations in southwest Asia. However others claim that al-Liby has revealed an intimate knowledge of operations all over the world to his interrogators, including strikes in Britain. 'Al-Liby was al-Qaeda's pointman, dealing with all the local self-formed groups that are now springing up all over the world. Al-Qaeda want to hit America but if they can't then the UK is the next best target. A bunch of guys turning up from Britain with no previous record and a strong commitment to violent action would be just what they wanted,' said one security source.

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British police have asked Pakistani investigators to find out if other bombers travelled to Pakistan, especially the 30-year-old Sidique Khan who fits the profile of a cell leader far better than Tanweer and has been said to have received militant training in Pakistan or Afghanistan. And has either the 'fifth man' or the supposed mastermind who left before the bombings fled to Pakistan?

The answers may lie three hundred miles west of Rawalpindi, on the border with Afghanistan, in the semi-autonomous tribal agencies. Though nominally part of Pakistan, here the law depends on local chiefs, clerics and the Kalashnikov. and dozens of other senior Islamic militants are thought to be hiding amid the territories' dusty, craggy mountains and desert plateaux, protected by the devout and fiercely independent local tribes.

Last year the Briton held in western Pakistan in whom UK authorities have shown a particular interest in recent days, allegedly attended a meeting of top militants in Wana, a town in the Waziristan tribal agency, at which attacks in the West are believed to be discussed. It is around Wana that, this weekend, investigators are hunting for answers to many of the outstanding questions.

Chapter 4: A call to prayer

The bright pink walls and clashing magenta carpets confirm Beeston's modest mosque has changed little in its 24 years. Yet for those attending Friday prayers in the Stratford Street prayer room last week, it felt like nothing would be the same again.

In hushed tones, the imam told worshippers in Urdu that the attacks had left Beeston with a heavy heart. He asked them to remember those who had lost their children in the attacks. Later that afternoon, as the world's media hovered outside one of the mosques where Britain's suicide bombers had attended, Mahmood Akhter explained that they

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had never subscribed to radicalism. 'We've never had an imam who has had an aggressive tone, let alone say aggressive things. Nothing like Abu Hamza and his hook. We have nothing to apologise for and nothing to hide,' he said.

However he did admit concern over the alienating effect Britain's war on terror was having on the UK's younger Muslim community. 'A big thing is Iraq and Afghanistan. Lots of youngsters, whether they have Islamic knowledge or not get automatically affected. It triggers something.' Men like Akhter must now encourage unity in the community. Yesterday thousands of people from all faiths across Britain marched together to demonstrate their desire for peace. Among the rallys held were Dewsbury where 300 gathered in a town that until recently a would-be suicide bomber had lived among them. Another marched through Burley in northern Leeds. Children chanted 'peace and unity in our community' as they filed past police cordons outside the house where the explosives detonated in London were constructed.

Yet for a minority Britain as an ethnically harmonious society is anathema to their world vision. In the hours after the London atrocities, messages had already begun appearing on Islamic websites glorifying the carnage. 'It was God's will to give you a state of the pain,' read one.

Already the pain has begun to seep from the centre of the capital to the northern cotton towns where Britain's race relations can be most brittle. The first retaliatory attacks in West Yorkshire occurred in the early hours of Friday. The windows of homes belonging to Asian families in Burley were smashed. More attacks seem inevitable.

The capital too waits for another hit, bloodied and waiting and hoping against hope there isn't a next time.

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