Posted on 07/16/2005 6:29:09 AM PDT by cooper72
The Times charts the last hours of the first home-grown suicide bombers to hit Britain
ON THE afternoon of Wednesday, July 6, Hasib Hussain told his mother that he was thinking of going to London “with a few of the lads” to attend a religious seminar. “I might go to London for the night and come back tomorrow morning,” he said vaguely. Then the burly 18-year-old slumped down on the sofa in the sitting room of the family house in Holbeck, and went to sleep. Hussain had become intensely religious since he returned from Pakistan, but he was still a teenager in other respects.
Maniza Hussain knew that her younger son, the baby of the family, kept irregular hours, sometimes visiting the mosque in Stratford Street five times a day. At least twice a month he would announce he was going to stay with friends. When Maniza went out shopping, Hussain was still sleeping on the sofa. She never saw him again.
In the nearby Leeds suburb of Beeston, Hussain’s best friend, Shehzad Tanweer, was also preparing to leave behind the rundown brick terraces where he had spent all of his 22 years. A week earlier, he had hired a red Nissan Micra for the journey, using his own name and credit card. The car was already overdue to be returned to the car hire company. Tanweer didn’t care, for he had no intention of returning it.
The two friends were different in many ways. The younger boy, 6ft 2in, aggressive and argumentative, had always struggled at school. Gawky, ungainly and not very bright, he was overshadowed by his older brother, Imran, universally known as Immy, a glamorous figure in the tight-knit Asian community of south Leeds.
Hussain had got into trouble with the police for shoplifting, and left Matthew Murray Comprehensive with no GCSEs and one GNVQ in business studies. When he had started going to pubs, fighting and swearing, his worried parents had sent him to an Islamic study school in Pakistan, thinking that might give him more of a focus.
And it had. Religion seemed to have straightened him out, almost overnight. The scruffy, troubled boy who had left Leeds returned with an austere manner and an Islamic beard. He now wore the topi hat and flowing Islamic robes. Some of his contemporaries thought him “a bit of prat”, but his parents were relieved that he seemed to have settled down.
Shehzad Tanweer was cut from rather different cloth. A natural athlete with a good academic record, he had sailed through Wortley High School, and gone on to study sports science at Leeds Metropolitan University. His bedrooom was a shrine to sport, with a shelf full of trophies for the long-jump, football and cricket. Lean, sporty and self-assured, he helped out by running sports activities for children at the local social club, and worked part-time in his father’s fish and chip shop.
The Tanweers were comparatively well-off, and Shehzad considered himself rather stylish in his designer tracksuits and trainers. Even when wearing traditional Islamic garb to the mosque, he donned an adidas cap.
Like his younger friend, Tanweer had recently returned from an Islamic study school near Lahore. His religious fervour was fired by the experience, though he complained of the heat, the poverty and the attitude of the Pakistanis towards the British. Tanweer was proud of being British.
Only someone who knew them well would have noticed anything different about the two young men driving the Nissan. The day before leaving, Tanweer had dyed his hair and eyebrows light brown, in what may have been a rudimentary attempt at disguise. A week earlier, Hussain had shaved off his thick beard. It was now growing back. When a friend asked him why he had done this, his answer was peculiar: Hussain said he was sick of rival imams offering different rules on facial hair. “I don ’t like one mosque saying one thing, and one mosque saying another,” he had said, before adding portentously: “I will go my own way.”
At some point in the late afternoon or early evening, the friends linked up with the third member of the party, Mohammad Sidique Khan. At 30, Khan was the oldest of the trio, and in many ways the oddest: no naïve and angry youth, but a professional, married man, with a steady job, a pregnant wife, a baby daughter, a new council house, a season ticket to the gym and a silver Honda Civic. A thickset man with the big brown eyes of a spaniel, Khan was well known around Leeds. For five years he had worked as a learning mentor to children at Hillside Primary School, where about 30 per cent of the children have special needs. The children loved the big, soft-voiced man, and called him “buddy”.
Everyone agreed, Mohammad loved children; but not enough, apparently, to want to watch his own grow up.
Four years ago, he married Hasina Patel, an Indian Muslim three years his junior. In some ways, it was an unlikely pairing. Khan was a traditional Muslim, and growing more so, but his wife’s family was liberal. Hasina wore a burka, but they disagreed about the extremist Taleban regime in Afghanistan, of which Khan approved. There were rumours of a separation. A daughter, Maryam, was born 14 months ago, and Hasina told a neighbour she was pregnant again.
When the family moved from Beeston to a council house in Dewsbury, Khan continued to worship at the more radical Stratford Street mosque, and to do volunteer work at the community centre. There he met the youngsters Tanweer and Hussain and became, it seems, a very different sort of mentor. Locals said Khan was spreading extremism; some thought him a “fruitcake”.
Impeccably professional, Khan warned his employers that he would not be coming in to work on Thursday. But he did not tell his wife where he was going when he climbed into the rental car, and headed to London to kill himself and as many other people as possible.
The trio appear to have made one more stop in Leeds, at a flat in the Hyde Park area of Burley, where, a week later, police found a bath filled with explosives, manufactured to the precise recipe laid down by al-Qaeda instructors. The lease on that flat is believed to have been arranged by Magdy el-Nashar, the Egyptian chemist arrested yesterday in Cairo. El-Nashar, who obtained a PhD at Leeds University, had left Britain only a few days earlier.
With a boot filled with high-grade bomb-making material, they headed out of the city’s leafy suburbs and on to the M1, heading south, past fields of newly cut hay. Perhaps they discussed plans as they drove south; perhaps they prayed. Or perhaps they talked of cricket. The two younger men were obsessed by the game. Tanweer had even talked of turning professional. The next day, July 7, was the first of the NatWest one-day games between England and Australia. The two younger men may still have been unaware that they would be dead before the first ball was bowled. But Khan, the older man, surely knew that theirs was a suicide mission.
Late on Wednesday or in the early hours of Thursday, they turned off the M1 north of London, to meet the fourth and final member of the team: Jermaine Lindsay, or Jamal, a 19-year-old, black, Jamaican-born Muslim convert. The rendezvous point may have been Lindsay’s rented house in Aylesbury, where he lived with his white wife, Samantha, another convert to Islam, and their child, Sherafiyah. Lindsay, a body-builder and carpet-fitter with a shaven head and a beard, had met at least one of the others at an Islamic school in Pakistan, and had often visited his radical friends in Leeds.
Before dawn on July 7, the four men shaved their body hair in a ceremony of religious purification. By this point they knew they were about to die. They were dressed in casual clothes, jeans, T-shirts and jackets. Each carried credit cards, driving licences and other forms of identification. The men evidently wanted their identities to be known afterwards: martyrdom may be vanity at its most extreme. They synchronised watches.
The plan had been worked out long before, by a more senior al-Qaeda commander already long vanished. In the brutal symbolism so beloved of al-Qaeda, the four foot soldiers would disperse at King’s Cross to the four corners of the compass, and then detonate their bombs simultaneously, in one co-ordinated attack that would cripple the Tube system and kill as widely as possible at the busiest point of the morning rush hour.
The journey from Aylesbury to Luton takes nearly an hour. They arrived at Luton station at about 7am, and parked in the car park. Lindsay bought a pay and display ticket, and dutifully stuck it on the windshield. The DNA he left on that scrap of paper would later be used to identify what remained of his body.
Each man carried a large, military-style rucksack packed with more than 10kg of explosive, but a quantity of explosive was left in the car boot, perhaps intended for use by a fifth bomber. The CCTV camera on the platform at Luton filmed the four, unobtrusive young men as they prepared to board the 7.40 to King’s Cross. The camera also picked up a fifth man, standing alongside them, who then peeled off and vanished into the crowd.
The Thameslink train stopped at Harpenden and St Albans, and drew into King’s Cross at 8.26. Hasib Hussain was filmed joking and laughing with his partners as they parted. They looked like hitchhikers, “as if they were going on holiday”. There was no elaborate leave-taking, since they intended to see one another in Heaven, in a very few minutes.
Khan caught the 8.43 Circle Line train in the direction of Edgware Road. Tanweer headed for the opposite platform, and boarded the eastbound train. Lindsay took the Piccadilly Line towards Russell Square, and Hussain, the youngster, is thought to have made for the Bank branch of the Northern Line, heading towards Camden.
Tanweer detonated his bomb first, clutching the rucksack to his chest, as each of the bombers had been taught. Between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, the cricket-loving young man who considered himself British, murdered seven people, injured scores and blew himself to pieces. Khan’s bomb went off moments later at Edgware Road, killing another seven, maiming ten for life, and injuring more than 100. Lindsay’s packed train departed later; he set his bomb off seconds after leaving the station: 26 died.
Hasib Hussain may even have heard it go off. The Northern Line was closed, and Hussain, the teenage mule, seems to have been plunged into indecision. As he retraced his steps, and then travelled up the escalator out of the station, he joined the hundreds of passengers fleeing the stricken transport system, and heard the wail of sirens as police and emergency service converged on the scene.
Hussain had never shown much initiative at anything. He was a born follower. Did he call his controller to ask what he should do now? Did he panic, or have second thoughts? Did he study the Tube map and wonder whether he should still try to head north, and complete the plan? Knowing what we do of Hussain, he probably did nothing, but wandered around, wondering. “I will go my own way,” the baby-faced bomber had said, after shaving off his beard. But now, it seems, deprived of leadership and with his fellow conspirators already dead, he did not know which way to go.
For nearly an hour, Hussain’s movements are unknown. Finally, he appears to have made up his mind, or his mind was made up for him. The lanky teenager climbed on the No 30 bus, heading for Hackney and full of passengers. It is likely that he had never been on a London double-decker bus before; he sat on the top deck. The driver, George Psaradakis, was following an alternative route to avoid the snarled traffic at King’s Cross, and the bus crawled along Upper Woburn Place into Tavistock Square. Richard Jones, a passenger standing near the back of the upper deck, noticed a man “of Mediterranean appearance” who kept dipping down into the rucksack at his feet, and seemed increasingly agitated. “He was fiddling away and kept getting annoyed with something.” Realising the bus was being diverted, Mr Jones asked the driver to let him off.
Hussain may have been trying to detonate the bomb; more likely he was trying to disarm it, and could not. A second before the explosion, passengers heard a man’s piercing scream of terror from the back of the bus. One described the sound as “ghastly, and not of this world”. This was not the final yell of the Muslim martyr, but the cry of a fool and a coward, suddenly staring at his own death.
maybe the piercing scream was that of a passenger who saw a man trying to detonate a bomb .... this article seems a bit much
In what way is it "a bit much"?
Instead, tell me about the last hours of the victims. the good-byes to their families and their screams. The victims had no choice.
Do you not get it? It isn't glorifying them, it is showing that monsters are in our midst, but they do not wear horns and big red capes.
Are we to censor what happened?
May these "lads" enjoy their 72 new mother in laws.
BUMP to read later.
I'd like to see a follow up of the 9/11 widows and their babies - that would be a good reminder lest we lose our resolve.
just that it seems to be a lot of conjecture (inference from defective or presumptive evidence) that he knew what this guy was thinking and assumed he had a turn of heart ... terrorists are known for secondary bombings after a first one to take murder rescue teams
A piece like this could never be written for American newspaper. I mean, it's so very . . . judgmental. After all, it's not as though these misguided young men were Christians or something. The writer clearly needs to get more Diversity Training.
"His parents sent him to an Islamic school in Pakistan, thinking it might straighten him out." oh hellO.
Sure did...went from being a troubled teenager...shoplifting and getting into bar fights...
Then he got religion
....and became a suicide murdering piece of shiite...or whabbist...or sunni...or some other murdering branch.
These people don’t have a sense of history. It appears because muslim immigrants refuse to integrate, they are building their own ghettos. Can a “final solution” be far behind? Self-imposed destruction.
Nice husband and father, that Khan. Loved kids so much he abandoned his earthly family for 72 mythical Houri.
May they look like Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton and Maddy Albright.
It never said anything about a turn of heart. He did go underground and he did turn back. That is what happened and I don't think anyone is suggesting he turned into a good-guy all of a sudden.
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