Posted on 07/12/2005 10:03:07 PM PDT by XR7
FOUR friends from northern England have changed the face of terrorism by carrying out the suicide bombings that brought carnage to London last week.
It emerged last night that, for the first time in Western Europe, suicide bombers have been recruited for attacks. Security forces are coming to terms with the realisation that young Britons are prepared to die for their militant cause.
Three of the men lived in Leeds and the immediate fear is that members of a terrorist cell linked to the city are planning further strikes. The mastermind behind the attacks and the bombmaker are both still thought to be at large.
The man who planted the bomb at Edgware Road was named last night as Mohammed Sidique Khan, 30, the married father of an eight-month-old baby, who is believed to have come from the Leeds area.
Two other terrorists were Hasib Hussain, 19, who bombed the bus in Tavistock Square, of Colenso Mount, Leeds, and Shehzad Tanweer, 22, the Aldgate bomber, who lived at Colwyn Road, Leeds.
Police are still trying to identify the fourth, whose remains are believed to be in the bombed Tube train carriage on the Piccadilly Line. It is thought that he comes from Luton.
Armed police raided six addresses in West Yorkshire yesterday, including the homes of three of the men, who they now know travelled to Luton in a hired car last Wednesday to join the fourth man. They boarded the 7.40 Thameslink train to King’s Cross the next day, each armed with a 10lb rucksack bomb.
Police found a bomb factory in Leeds containing a “viable amount of explosives”. Explosives were also recovered from a car left parked near Luton station. The raids came after the discovery of driving licences and credit cards at the scenes of the explosions, and a telephone call from the mother of Hasib Hussain, who asked police to try to trace her son.
A relative of one of the bombers was arrested and taken to London for questioning. Intelligence agencies say that at least two of the men had recently returned from Pakistan. All four were British, but with origins in Pakistan. MI6, MI5 and British diplomats were in touch with the Pakistani authorities last night to try to track down any connections with terrorists there. Security sources confirmed that none of the bombers was on any MI5 file, although one had links to a person investigated by police.
The four were captured on CCTV cameras at King’s Cross Thameslink station, laughing together and carrying rucksacks, minutes before they set off for their targets at 8.30am on July 7.
Puts a new spin on the term Fab Four, doesn't it?
Once again, a religion of pieces
You know what they were doing in Pakistan, I know it, the whole world knows...that they met an Al Qaeda contact over there.
Yet our corrupt Intelligence Agencies aren't able to infiltrate Al Qaeda.
18 year old Children are infiltrating Al Qaeda, just not our Intel Agencies!
Just like the Lodi, CA cell.
Why do you say that?
Think carefully before answering.
Do "infiltrate" and "recruited" mean the same thing?
Islamofacists are nuts. They are taught from day one that taking out an infidel will ensure entrance to heaven.
And they didn't bust 'em and lock 'em up or send them back to Pakistan?
"Intelligence" agency MYASS!
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. No Nigal, no Ian, no Terry... Just those happy little traditional English lads named Mohammed, Hasib and Shehzad. I think I recall some English Imam condemning people for assuming Muslim's were responsible. I'm just going to guess these guys weren't Church of England.
A lot of folks from their "neighborhood" are going on record condemning them and their despicable acts, but I can't help but wonder how long it will be before their photos start showing up on T-shirts...
But, we were told not to jump to conclusions!
I wonder what made them so happy?
And all of our lives previous to 9-11 we we told that it couldn't happen here.
Syrian terror suspect
Mustafa Setmariam NasarArchitect of mayhem is sure to have fled before the blasts
By Daniel McGrory
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1689486,00.html
INVESTIGATORS believe the mastermind of the synchronised bombings in London fled the country long before the attack. He would have travelled on the Underground network, studied timetables and known his way around major stations such as King’s Cross. Security chiefs say he would have organised his own escape with the same precision.
The hunt for the organiser of the London cell has spread worldwide with police studying suspects from Scandinavia to the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some of the names being circulated are linked to al-Qaeda’s high command, while others are said to be veterans of terror training camps who have been careful to steer clear of radical groups they knew would be kept under surveillance.
The police list also includes a number of British-based radicals of mainly North African origin. A major problem for Scotland Yard is that a number of these men are on the run in countries such as Iraq where they remain beyond the reach of any authority.
One senior police source said “The pattern of these attacks is that the masterminds make sure they are well clear before the bombs explode.”
The meticulous timing of the Tube bombings also leads investigators to think that the architect is likely to have been involved in planning other terror operations. In Spain, police say the radical leader who planned the bombing of four Madrid commuter trains in March 2004 has never been found.
Experts from a dozen countries are already assisting the Yard, including a team from Spain who have handed over files on some of the alleged architects of the Madrid bombings who are still on the run.
Their main focus is on Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, 46, a Syrian with joint Spanish nationality who lived in North London in the mid-1990s. As The Times revealed last week, he left Britain to start up a terror training camp in Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks where he groomed scores of young British recruits.
Nasar, who has a $5 million (£2.9 million) bounty on his head and who lived in Neasden with his wife and child, has a record of setting up “sleeper cells” wherever he has been.
Two of his lieutenants in the Madrid operation were North Africans who carried British passports in the names of Burgess and Frost. They too have disappeared. There have been various sightings of Nasar, with the latest intelligence reports suggesting he is now in Iraq.
Reports from Denmark yesterday said that police have been asked to track down Abu Rashid, a fellow Syrian, who was Nasar’s deputy at one of his training camps in the mountains straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Rashid is said to have disappeared from his home in Braband, near Aarhus, but police say that he was kept under only loose surveillance by the Danish authorities.
Major Soeren Bach of the Danish Military Academy has described his country as a safe haven for Islamic radicals, saying: “We have decided to leave these people in peace because it is easier to do this rather than get into a legal battle with them.”
The attacks in London triggered a massive security operation in Italy, where police arrested 142 people over the weekend and issued deportation notices for 52 illegal immigrants.
As some of the suspects on Britain’s list are already in custody abroad, British police will ask permission to interview them in prison.
One figure was named as Zeeshan Hyder Siddiqui, 25, a British national who is in prison in Pakistan and is alleged to be among those schooled in bomb-making at one of Nasar’s camps. Siddiqui is from West London and studied physics at a university in the capital.
The Moroccan authorities are still hunting for two clerics said to have helped to plan a string of bomb attacks in Casablanca in May 2003. The two, who cannot be named for legal reasons, are understood to have visited Britain a number of times.
Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, who retired as Metropolitan Police Commissioner in January, argued that everyone involved in this atrocity would be found closer to home. He wrote in his News of the World column “any hope the attackers came from abroad was dangerous wishful thinking. The bombers will be apparently ordinary British citizens, young men conservatively and cleanly dressed and probably with some higher education.
“Highly computer literate, they will have used the internet to research explosives, chemicals and electronics. They are also willing to kill without mercy — and to take a long time in their planning.”
His remarks angered race relations groups. Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission in London, said the claims were unfounded and threw suspicion on all Muslims in Britain.
He said: “He has, without doubt stirred up racial tensions at a time when we need unity.” Lord Stevens is confident the public outrage will “unleash a tidal wave” of information from the Muslim community.
He estimates that up to 3,000 British-based militants passed through training camps over the past decade. Details are scant of what became of these recruits. Some are known to have fought in Kashmir, Chechnya and Iraq, but the majority slipped back to Britain.
I think in any culture it could only be false bravado. Men everywhere are made that way.
"Slipped back to Britain," eh?
Don't tell me there aren't traitors in our midst.
I say it because Al Qaeda wouldn't exist if any of our Intel Agencies made a successful penetration.
The circle will come back to Bush and the US ..we will be blamed by the BBC in the long run..Just give them a few more days to iron out the details of how they can somehow make a connection..The world HAS gone mad for sure..
The Brits let the Moslem population do as they pleased , preach violence out in the open..Now they reap the benifits of a PC society..
My dad taught me as a kid that the US only has 3 real friends in the world.England , The Aussies and Israel..I'd like ot think of the Brits the way they were in WWII..stoic , brave , no nonsense in the face of evil , but it's a different world. I think England will fold like Spain did eventually..Too many liberals and Leftist ..Half the damn country is Arabic these days it seems.I dont think th eBrits have the balls anymore they way they always did ..If so , it never would have gone as far as it has already.These insane clerics would have been in jail a long time already .The majority of the UK is as leftist and radical as the Dems are here in the US.
Yep.
After all, if we hadn't attacked Iraq, none of this would have happened, right?
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