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British Police Hunt Bomb Masterminds Officials Say 5th Suspect is Still at Large; 4 Suicide Attackers Were 'Homegrown'

Posted on: Thursday, 14 July 2005, 12:00 CDT

Britain said Wednesday that it was hunting the masterminds behind the terror bomb attacks last week and investigators said that a fifth suspect possibly the bombmaker was still at large after the strikes on three subway trains and a double-decker bus in London.

The developments emerged as Charles Clarke, the home secretary, offered the first official indication that British officials believed the four attackers were suicide bombers who blew themselves up in the July 7 attacks. The attacks confronted Britons with the circumstances they feared most a suicidal attack by British-born terrorists drawn from the ranks of disaffected Muslims and seeming to copy the grim tactics of assailants most people see only on their television screens from Israel or Iraq.

According to police accounts, the four men, aged 18 to 30, gathered at the King's Cross station at the heart of the subway system and fanned out from there, detonating explosives on the subway trains and the bus. "This is not an isolated criminal act we are dealing with," Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament. "It is an extreme and evil ideology whose roots lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of the religion of Islam."

Britain has long been accused of being too soft on hard-line Muslim clerics using mosques to incite fundamentalism. In Parliament, Blair said he planned to open negotiations with other political parties on new antiterror laws.

"We will look urgently at how we strengthen the procedures to exclude people from entering the U.K. who may incite hatred or act contrary to the public good, and at how we deport such people, if they come here, more easily," Blair said.

Muslims and Christians alike have recoiled from the notion that the suspected bombers had emerged from the ranks of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, who make up about 3 percent of the population. Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative opposition, said: "What we know now is appalling to contemplate. It will take us a long time to come to terms with the fact that these atrocities appear to have been committed by those who were born and brought up in our midst."

The men were thought to be from families who immigrated from Pakistan but who had since taken British citizenship.

Mohammed Sarwar, a Muslim member of Parliament from Blair's Labour Party, said, "We are deeply shocked that these are homegrown bombers, and the vast majority of the Muslim community condemn these barbaric attacks." Investigators said they were concerned that, despite raids Tuesday on six homes in the Leeds area and the seizure of a car laden with explosives at Luton, north of London, some of the explosive used in the attack might still be at large. The explosives were of the high-grade military type.

The investigators said they were concerned that the London bombers had obtained such powerful explosives, possibly from contacts with access to plastic explosives in Bosnia. Investigators were also trying urgently to discover whether the London bombers had access to agents of Al Qaeda, possibly in North Africa.

The recovery of some explosives after searches of houses in Leeds and an abandoned car in Luton, however, was likely to enable investigators to be more certain of its origins.

The investigators did not identify the suspected fifth terrorist they were hunting. A 29-year-old man was detained under antiterrorism laws in Leeds on Tuesday but he was thought to be a relative of one of the bombers rather than a bombmaker himself. A court on Wednesday granted the police three more days to question the man without charging him.

Investigators described the suspected fugitive bombmaker as "a highly-trained person" who would still present a threat if there was continued access to a supply of explosives. Three of the four suspected bombers have been identified as Shehzad Tanweer, 22, who died on a subway train at Aldgate station (earlier reports said he died aboard the double-decker bus); Hasib Hussain, 19, thought to have died aboard the bus, and Muhammad Sadique Khan, 30, thought to have died on a subway train at Edgware Road. A fourth bomb exploded on a subway train between the King's Cross and Russell Square stations. Ever since the bombings, the police have given the impression that the attackers were what Clarke on Wednesday referred to as "foot soldiers" whose very anonymity made it easier for them to slip through the net of the security services.

After a meeting of European Union interior ministers in Brussels, Nicholas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, said that "it seems that part of this team had been subject to partial arrest" in the spring of 2004.

Clarke denied the allegation.

"I did not have any conversation with Mr. Sarkozy about it and I simply don't know where he could have got that from to make these remarks," he said. Sarkozy's aides scrambled later to say that he had been referring to arrests among the broader Islamic movement, not the London bombers.

Before the meeting, Clarke said European nations had to defend their values of society "against those who would destroy it."

Without using the term "suicide bombing," he said: "That means standing out against, in a very strong way, anybody who preaches the kind of fundamentalism, as I say, that can lead four young men to blow themselves and others up on the Tube on a Thursday morning. We have got to root out those elements from within our community that want to destroy it. That puts different burdens on all of us."

Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sheparo, said Wednesday that his country had given information to Britain about a possible attack before the British elections in May, but did not elaborate.

With government ministers warning that more attackers may still be at large, many Britons have shown themselves phlegmatic about the perils they may be facing, despite a rash of security scares across London as the police investigate apparently suspicious packages.

"I'd rather catch a bus than a Tube now unless I'm in a desperate hurry," said David Ellis, 45, an office worker awaiting a subway train at the St. James's Park station. "Probably before long I will have forgotten about it. It sounds dreadful but you just get on with life."

In radio talk shows and in e-mails to television stations, Britons seemed more puzzled and annoyed about the causes of the attack.

"We've got to look at the reasoning behind these things," said Saraj Qazi, a 25-year-old Muslim boutique owner in Luton, where the police suspect the bombers gathered for their final brief journey into London on July 7.

"There's no denying it's payback for what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "You've been bombing people for the last two to four years, so you are going to get a backlash."

Blair has tried hard to deflect such explanations for Muslim disaffection, arguing that terrorism and suicide attacks predate the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But some Muslims such as Qazi express more complex feelings, condemning the attacks in London, but blaming Blair's government and its close alliance with the United States in Iraq for Muslim disaffection. "England is a great country and we love it to bits but do we love this government? No," Qazi said. "There were 24 Muslims killed in Iraq today; there will be more tonight and more tomorrow."

The identification of the attackers as British-born Muslims has deepened the anxieties of Muslim leaders that they will face a backlash. There have already been incidents of mosques being attacked. "The fear is very palpable," said Rob Beckley, a senior police officer.

Blair, who met with Muslim legislators on Wednesday, promised immediate discussions with Muslim leaders to "debate the right way forward."

But, referring to Islamic extremism, he said: "In the end this can only be taken on and defeated by the community itself." In Parliament, Shahid Malik, a Labour member from the same West Yorkshire where the suspects in the bombings lived, said condemnation of extremists was "not enough and British Muslims must, and I believe, are prepared to, confront the voices of evil head on."

The notion of more draconian anti-terror laws has raised concerns that Britain will forfeit its longstanding commitment to tolerance and civil rights in the name of a war on terror modeled on that of the United States.

*

Helene Fouquet in Brussels, Sarah Lyall in Luton and Don Van Natta Jr., Pam Kent and Stephen Grey in London contributed reporting to this article.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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