I said earlier that the tentacles on this story would take a while to follow.
British bombers likely recruited at government-funded centre
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Globe and Mail
Thursday, July 14, 2005 Page A1
LEEDS -- The transformation of four young British men into terrorists appears to have taken place at a government-funded storefront youth centre in Leeds that, according to youth workers, was a hub of radical Islamist activity.
The centre was sealed off and searched by police yesterday after three of its workers said in an interview on the street outside that at least two of the suicide bombers had been "very regular" visitors at all hours to the Hamara Youth Access Point, and a third had been seen there occasionally.
"It had become so radical and so hateful that I asked if I could stop working there," said one of the workers, who along with two others described the storefront drop-in centre as a hub of radical Muslim politics and a hotbed of Islamic organizing, routinely hosting mysterious figures to speak about extremist politics.
All three workers, two of them white British Christians, live in the poor Beeston area, which was home to two of the bombers, Shahzad Tanweer, 22, and Hasib Hussain, 18.
A third bomber, 30-year-old Mohammed Sadique Khan, also lived in this tight-knit community in Leeds until a few months ago, when he moved with his wife and their infant child to Dewsbury, not far to the south, where he worked as a well-respected primary-school teacher.
It appears that this modest youth centre is the point where these three young men converged with the fourth bomber and a leading figure who was being sought by police last night.
"It's fair to say that there was some kind of recruiting going on here," one of the workers said. "Some of the youth workers were really involved with it, and it got to the point where they were acting really hostile to anyone who wasn't their kind of Muslim."
As the interview was taking place on the street, police cordoned off the building, expelled people from neighbouring buildings and began a detailed search of the youth centre.
The centre receives funding from the British government and the European Union, as well as charitable funds, and as such is officially secular and non-political. But in practice, it was neither. On its walls were posters from the Respect Party, an extremist pro-Islamic party founded by MP George Galloway, that showed Israeli soldiers pointing rifles at Palestinian children. When some workers complained about these, they were harassed by other staffers.
The hostile, politicized mood at the centre stands in stark contrast to the descriptions of the young bombers made by their relatives and neighbours yesterday.
They are well known in Beeston, a culturally mixed neighbourhood whose rundown houses and barren storefronts reveal a history of economic troubles. The most prosperous of them, Mr. Tanweer, worked at the fish-and-chips shop owned by his father, a few hundred metres up the road.
"He wasn't political at all -- he never mentioned Iraq or anything. We talked every day, and all he wanted to talk about was sports and cars," said Iftiahar Hussain, 27, as he opened the shop at 11:30 yesterday morning. "I wish I knew what was influencing him."
The answer to that question does not seem to sit in any of the mosques that pepper the area, most of them small and barren. None of the bombers werestrongly connected with a particular mosque, although they all began praying five times a day as they became more devout during the past two years.
"When you're that religious, you just go to whichever mosque happens to be near what you're doing," said Nusrut Hussain, a close friend of one of Mr. Tanweer's sisters.
Like most Muslims in this part of Leeds, her devotion to the faith is fairly light. "I'm not especially religious -- I'll bring my kids to the mosque in the morning and drop them off there to get some religious teaching."
Most people here feel that none of the mosques have adopted the highly radical, anti-Western politics that have turned some London houses of worship into Islamist recruiting centres. They say, however, that study groups have formed on the edges of congregations that may teach a much more political form of Islam.
Family and friends of the young men repeatedly said yesterday that they had seen no indication that they had adopted such influences. Although they had become more devoutly religious and travelled to Pakistan for study trips, it is not uncommon for naturalized children of immigrants in this part of England to become more devout than their secularized parents. Terrorism is another matter.
"I never saw any sign of any politics in him -- I mean, when he read the paper he would only look at the sports pages," Mr. Tanweer's uncle, Bashir Ahmed, said in an interview yesterday. "He had been religious for some time, and I thought on Wednesday that he was going to one of his religious meetings. He was going to them all the time."
Mr. Ahmed said that he was "devastated and confused" by his nephew's turn to terrorism, and said that he must have fallen under the influence of mysterious forces.
But the young men, despite having fallen into religion, were not entirely pure. Both Mr. Tanweer and Hasib Hussain were arrested last year, for disorderly conduct and shoplifting, respectively, and were released after being cautioned.
The fourth bomber's identity has still not been revealed, although police told reporters yesterday that they had found his body in the Piccadilly Line train that blew up between King's Cross and Russell Square stations.
It appears that he may have lived in a house just down the street from the Hamara youth centre. That house, which neighbours said was home to brothers who were raised by their mother and were close friends of some of the other bombers, was sealed off by police yesterday. |
