The bomber from Bromley
BY DOMINIC KENNEDY, RICHARD FORD AND SAM LISTER
Airline 'shoe' terrorist converted to Islam in jail
His mosque in Brixton fears al-Qaeda links
THE man accused of smuggling bombs concealed in his shoes on to an American aircraft is a small-time British criminal who converted to Islam behind bars.
A possible link to Osama bin Laden emerged when The Times discovered that the alleged bomber, Richard Reid, 28, who was identified by British police from fingerprints sent by the FBI, was a worshipper at a London mosque also attended by one of the suspected conspirators of September 11.
The leader of Brixton Mosque in South London said that Mr Reid was incapable of acting alone and was probably on a test mission for a new terrorist technique when he apparently tried to detonate C4 plastic explosive packed into his shoes on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami last Saturday.
Mr Reid, a mixed-race Briton who appeared in court in Boston on Christmas Eve accused of assaulting flight attendants, was overpowered by passengers and crew.
He was born in Farnborough Hospital in Bromley, southeast London, in the summer of 1973. His English mother Lesley came to Brixton Mosque looking for her son several months ago after he went to Pakistan and stopped communicating with his family.
His father Colvin is Jamaican. The couple married in Poplar, East London, a year before he was born. A streetwise South Londoner, Mr Reid was apparently radicalised by contact with London-based extremists.
He arrived at Brixton Mosque as a worshipper several years ago and was known by the name Abdel Rahim. A petty criminal with a string of convictions for street crime such as muggings, he is believed to have served time in several prisons and in the Feltham Young Offender Institution in West London. He converted to Islam while in custody.
He joined the Arabic classes at Brixton Mosque and completed the first of three books teaching Arabic. He was proficient enough to write to fellow worshippers in Arabic when he went abroad recently.
While he was at Brixton Mosque a fellow worshipper was Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan origin who lived in Brixton.
M Moussaoui has been charged in America with conspiracy over the September 11 attacks and is suspected of having been the “20th hijacker”, who was prevented from joining the outrages only because he had been detained for behaving suspiciously at a flight school.
Both men followed a similar path of conversion to radical Islam. They arrived at the mosque asking to learn the tenets of Islam.
They appear to have been targeted by London-based extremists who encouraged them to challenge the teachings of Brixton Mosque, which condemns terrorism, suicide bombings and Osama bin Laden.
AbdulHaqq Baker, chairman of Brixton Mosque, said of M Moussaoui: “We saw quite a stark change in him. He became infuriatingly arrogant. He would try and speak to other unsuspecting youths about his view. We would try and stop him.
“He kept asking us: ‘Do you know where there is jihad which I can fight?’ He would wear military gear and a rucksack showing he wasn’t sleeping in a fixed place.”
As for Mr Reid, Mr Baker said: “He was an amiable, happy-go-lucky individual, always wanting to get involved in things and helping. He was very keen to learn the basics of Islam.”
Mr Baker said that Mr Reid would have been incapable of devising the plot to blow up the aircraft over the Atlantic without help from fellow conspirators.
“No way could he do this on his own,” Mr Baker said. “He doesn’t have the capacity to think: ‘I’m going to get these explosives, I know where to get these explosives from, I’ll put them in my shoe’.
“He was a testing ground. If he had succeeded they would know this is a mechanism that works. If the plane had exploded there would have been very little trace of how that happened.”
The mosque found Mr Reid a job making incense sticks for Black Crescent, a company that provides employment for Muslims. The sticks are sold outside Brixton station.
“He was a regular south-east London youngster. He was very streetwise. He used street slang,” Mr Baker said.
At first Mr Reid used to come for prayer wearing fashionable Western street clothes. He had just started a beard when he first arrived at the mosque, then let it grow to full-length.
He also began to wear a traditional Muslim thobe. He originally wore this beneath fashionable jackets, but eventually replaced these with military tops.
“By the time he left he was clearly arguing for this fight with the non-Muslims and this warped understanding of jihad,” Mr Baker said. “Some of my colleagues remember clearly the heated discussions they had with him saying this belief in jihad is wrong.”
Mr Reid took a path that many prisoners may be following. Muslims make up the fourth largest group of inmates in prisons in England and Wales. Their numbers doubled between 1993 and 2000.
The latest Prison Service figures show that last year there were 4,298 Muslims in the jails; 25,567 Anglicans; 20,888 prisoners of no religion; and 11,327 Roman Catholics.
The figures do not disclose how many prisoners convert to another faith while serving a sentence. The Prison Service said that the present selfreporting system of religious affiliation made it impossible to track conversions in jail.
A Prison Service spokeswoman said yesterday: “We are not able to prevent people converting to another faith. The only way we would pick up a change of faith from Christian to Muslim would be if someone asked for a Muslim diet.”
thetimes.co.uk |
