Die Serie "London Bombing" ist eine Sammlung relevanter Artikel und Nachrichten aus verschiedenen Quellen. Das hier veröffentlichte Material dient als Grundlage für weitere Diskussionen und zur Vertiefung über die Terroranschläge in London. Die Serie besteht aus vier Teilen und steht mit dem letzten Teil als PDF Datei zum Download zur Verfügung.


► Arab Newspaper Slams Muslims
► London: Crossroads of Terror
► Information Sought on British Man
► Email Spying Could Have Stopped Killers
► The Hate
► British Youth – Islam Certainties
► Al Qaeda’s British Recruits
► The Changing Face of Al Qaeda



ARAB NEWSPAPER SLAMS MUSLIMS FOR AIDING TERROR
► The Washington Times / by Colin Freeman
► CCISS / by Martin Rudner / martin_rudner@carleton.ca

Jul 10 2005 ► Jul 10. The editor of the world's leading Arab newspaper has launched a scathing attack on Muslims in Britain for turning a blind eye to terrorist fundraising activities on their own doorstep.

Writing in the wake of Thursday's bombings, Tariq Al-Humayd, editor-in-chief of London-based Al-Sharq Al Awsat (The Middle East), claimed that collections were frequently solicited in London's Arab neighborhoods for terrorist causes in the guise of charities. In a strongly worded editorial, he said that those enjoying the freedom of life in Britain had a "responsibility" to scrutinize such collections carefully, and if necessary prevent them from taking place. "In London, we have seen, and are seeing, the money being collected in the streets, and the conventions under various titles, and everyone is inciting jihad in our Arab countries and cursing the land of unbelief in which they live," he wrote. "When you express amazement [at this], they tell you that this is freedom. Has freedom no responsibility? No one answers."

Mr. Al-Humayd added: "When you tell them, 'Stop being so tolerant of the incitement that comes from your own country, from your skies, and from your Internet' ... they turn away. And what happened? The terror struck London, indiscriminately. ... For the sake of freedom of all of us, stop the ones who are attacking our freedom."

Al-Sharq Al Awsat, founded 27 years ago, is regarded as the premiere pan-Arab daily, and is distributed in 19 Arab countries in addition to Europe and the United States. Its columnists voice a variety of views within the spectrum of Arab opinion, and the newspaper is considered highly influential.

In similar sentiments, Amir Taheri, an Al-Sharq Al Awsat columnist, criticized Muslims who equivocate over terrorist attacks. Insinuations that they were provoked by Western actions such as the invasion of Iraq, he said, simply gave terrorists the impression that they had tacit support. "Until we hear the voices of the Muslims condemning attacks of this kind with no words [of qualification] such as 'but' and 'if,' the suicide bombers and the murderers will have an excuse to think that they enjoy the support of all Muslims.

"The real battle against the enemy of mankind will begin when the 'silent majority' in the Islamic world makes its voice heard against the murderers, and against those who brainwash them, believe them, and fund them."

FOR A DECADE, LONDON THRIVED AS A BUSY CROSSROADS OF TERROR
► New York Times / by Elaine Sciolino
► CCISS / by Martin Rudner

Jul 10 2005 ► Jul 9. Long before bombings ripped through London on Thursday, Britain had become a breeding ground for hate, fed by a militant version of Islam.
For two years, extremists like Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a 47-year-old Syrian-born cleric, have played to ever-larger crowds, calling for holy war against Britain and exhorting young Muslim men to join the insurgency in Iraq. In a newspaper interview in April 2004, he warned that "a very well-organized" London-based group, Al Qaeda Europe, was "on the verge of launching a big operation" here.

In a sermon attended by more than 500 people in a central London meeting hall last December, Sheik Omar vowed that if Western governments did not change their policies, Muslims would give them "a 9/11, day after day after day."

If London became a magnet for fiery preachers, it also became a destination for men willing to carry out their threats. For a decade, the city has been a crossroads for would-be terrorists who used it as a home base, where they could raise money, recruit members and draw inspiration from the militant messages.

Among them were terrorists involved in attacks in Madrid, Casablanca, Saudi Arabia, Israel and in the Sept. 11 plot. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man charged in the United States in the 9/11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, the convicted shoe-bomber, both prayed at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. The mosque's former leader, Abu Hamza al-Masri openly preached violence for years before the authorities arrested him in April 2004.

Although Britain has passed a series of antiterrorist and immigration laws and made nearly 800 arrests since Sept. 11, 2001, critics have charged that its deep tradition of civil liberties and protection of political activists have made the country a haven for terrorists. The British government has drawn particular criticism from other countries over its refusal to extradite terrorism suspects.

For years, there was a widely held belief that Britain's tolerance helped stave off any Islamic attacks at home. But the anger of London's militant clerics turned on Britain after it offered unwavering support for the American-led invasion of Iraq. On Thursday morning, an attack long foreseen by worried counterterrorism officials became a reality.

"The terrorists have come home," said a senior intelligence official based in Europe, who works often with British officials. "It is payback time for a policy that was, in my opinion, an irresponsible policy of the British government to allow these networks to flourish inside Britain."

Those policies have been a matter of intense debate within the government, with the courts, the Blair government and members of Parliament frequently opposing one another.

For example, when the Parliament considered a bill in March that would have allowed the government to impose tough controls on terror suspects - like house arrests, curfews and electronic tagging - some legislators objected, saying it would erode civil liberties. "It does not secure the nation," William Cash, of the House of Commons, said of the bill. "It is liable to create further trouble and dissension among those whom we are seeking to control - the terrorists." The measure is still pending.

Investigators examining Thursday's attacks, which left at least 49 dead and 700 injured, are pursuing a theory that the bombers were part of a homegrown sleeper cell, which may or may not have had foreign support for the bomb-making phase of the operation.
If that theory proves true, it would reflect the transformation of the terror threat around Europe. With much of Al Qaeda's hierarchy either captured or killed, a new, more nimble terrorist force has emerged on the continent, comprising mostly semiautonomous, Qaeda-inspired local groups that are believed to be operating in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and other countries.

"Terrorists are not strangers, foreigners," said Bruno Lemaire, adviser to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of France. "They're insiders, well integrated inside the country."

Another senior intelligence official based in Europe said the fear was that there would be additional attacks in other European cities by homegrown sleeper cells inspired by Al Qaeda and by the attacks in Casablanca, Madrid and now London.

"This is exactly what we are going to witness in Europe: most of the attacks will be carried out by local groups, the people who have been here for a long time, well integrated into the fabric of society," the official said.

Well before Thursday's bombings, British officials predicted a terrorist attack in their country. In a speech in October 2003, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director general of MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence agency, said she saw "no prospect of a significant reduction in the threat posed to the U.K. and its interests from Islamist terrorism over the next five years, and I fear for a considerable number of years thereafter." Britain's challenge to detect militants on its soil is particularly difficult.

Counterterrorism officials estimate that 10,000 to 15,000 Muslims living in Britain are supporters of Al Qaeda. Among that number, officials believe that as many as 600 men were trained in camps connected with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

British investigators say that identifying Islamic militants among the two million Muslims living here, about 4 percent of the population, is especially hard. The Muslim community here is the most diverse of any in Europe in terms of ethnic origins, culture, history, language, politics and class. More than 60 percent of the community comes not from North African or Gulf Arab countries, but from countries like Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, British officials monitored radical Islamists but generally stopped short of arresting or extraditing them. After Sept. 11, the government passed legislation that allowed indefinite detention of terrorism suspects. But last year, it was overturned by Britain's highest court, the Law Lords, as a violation of human rights law.

Complicating Britain's antiterrorism strategy is its refusal or delays of requests for extradition of suspects by some allies, including the United States, France, Spain and Morocco.

Moroccan authorities, for example, are seeking the return of Mohammed el-Guerbozi, a battle-hardened veteran of Afghanistan who they say planned the May 2003 attacks in Casablanca, which killed 45 people. He has also been identified as a founder of the Moroccan Combatant Islamic Group, cited by the United Nations as a terrorist network connected to Al Qaeda. An operative in that group, Noureddine Nifa, told investigators that the organization had sleeper cells prepared to mount synchronized bombings in Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Canada. In an interview last year, Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, Morocco's chief of security, said Osama bin Laden authorized Mr. Guerbozi to open a training camp for Moroccans in Afghanistan in the beginning of 2001. Last December, Mr. Guerbozi was convicted in absentia in Morocco for his involvement in the Casablanca attacks and sentenced to 20 years.

But the British government has no extradition treaty with Morocco and has refused to extradite Mr. Guerbozi, a father of six who lives in a rundown apartment in north London. British officials say there is not enough evidence to arrest him, General Laanigri said.

Similarly, Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish investigating magistrate, has requested extradition of Abu Qatada, a radical Muslim cleric living in Britain who received political refugee status in the early 1990's. A Palestinian with Jordanian nationality, Mr. Qatada is described in court documents as the spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in Europe. Although Mr. Qatada was put under house arrest in 2002 and then arrested, he was freed in March and put into an observation program.

He is also wanted in Jordan, where he has been given a 15-year prison sentence in absentia for his connection to bomb attacks during 1998.

For 10 years, France has been fighting for the extradition of Rachid Ramda, a 35-year-old Algerian, over his suspected role in a bombing in Paris in 1995 staged by Algeria's militant Armed Islamic Group. Much to the irritation of the French, three years ago, Britain's High Court blocked a Home Office order to hand him over, citing allegations that his co-defendants gave testimony under torture by the French.

Last week, Mr. Clarke, the home secretary, approved the extradition order, but Mr. Ramda is appealing.

Another prime terrorism suspect who operated in London for years is Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, the suspected mastermind of the Madrid bombings. Although the authorities now cannot find him, he is believed to have visited Britain often and lived here openly from 1995 to 1998.

Officials believe he tried to organize his own extremist group before Sept. 11, but afterward officials say he pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden. He lived in north London and was the editor of a militant Islamist magazine, Al Ansar, which is published here, distributed at some mosques in Western Europe and closely monitored by British security officials.

Across Britain since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly 800 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act of 2000, according to recent police records. Of that number, 121 were charged with terrorism related crimes, but only 21 people have been convicted.

In one of the biggest antiterrorism cases made here, Scotland Yard arrested 12 men and charged them with making traces of the poison ricin inside an apartment in Wood Green, in north London, in January 2003. But 11 of the 12 men were acquitted without trial based on a lack of evidence.

Since Thursday's attacks, there have been calls for a crackdown on radical Muslims, including some from Britain's Muslim leaders.

"As far as I am concerned these people are not British," said Lord Nizar Ahmed, one of the few Muslims in the House of Lords. "They are foreign ideological preachers of hate who have been threatening our national security and encouraging young people into militancy. They should be put away and sent back to their countries." He added, "They created a whole new breeding ground for recruitment to radicalism."

Even last week's bombings did little to curtail the rhetoric of some of the most radical leaders, who criticized Prime Minister Tony Blair for saying that the bombings appeared to be the work of Islamic terrorists.

"This shows me that he is an enemy of Islam," Abu Abdullah, a self-appointed preacher and the spokes-man for the radical group Supporters of Shariah, said in an interview on Friday, adding, "Sometimes when you see how people speak, it shows you who your enemies are."

Mr. Abdullah declared that those British citizens who re-elected Mr. Blair "have blood on their hands" because British soldiers are killing Muslims. He also said that the British government, not Muslims, "have their hands" in the bombings, explaining, "They want to go on with their fight against Islam."

Imran Waheed, a spokesman for a radical British-based group, Hizb ut Tahrir, which is allowed to function here but is banned in Germany and much of the Muslim world, said: "When Westerners get killed, the world cries. But if Muslims get killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, it's the smallest of news. I will condemn what happened in London only after there is the promise from Western leaders to condemn what they have done in Falluja and other parts of Iraq and in Afghanistan."

So far, there appears to be little effort to restrain outspoken clerics, including prominent extremists like Sheik Omar, who has reportedly been under investigation by Scotland Yard.

Sheik Omar, who remains free, is an example of the double-edged policies in Britain. He is a political refugee who was given asylum 19 years ago and is supported by public assistance. Asked in an interview in May how he felt about being barred from obtaining British citizenship, he replied, "I don't want to become a citizen of hell."

INFORMATION SOUGHT ON BRITISH MAN
► The New York Times
► CCISS / by Martin Rudner

Jul 10 2005 ► Jul 8. British law enforcement officials investigating the terrorist attacks here asked their counterparts in Germany and Belgium for information about a London man who is accused by the Moroccan government of engineering the May 2003 terrorist attacks in Casablanca, two officials said Saturday.

The man, Mohammed el-Guerbozi, 48, a British citizen who was born in Morocco, has lived in London for nearly two decades.

At a news conference, Scotland Yard officials denied that Mr. Guerbozi was a suspect in the bombing attacks on Thursday. But on Saturday night, senior British officials said that for caution's sake, they had asked several countries in Europe for information about Mr. Guerbozi and his contacts.
Several news organizations in recent days reported that Mr. Guerbozi had fled London on Thursday. But in a telephone interview Saturday night, he said he was still in London and denied any involvement in the London bombings.

"Nothing is true," said Mr. Guerbozi. "What they said about me after the Madrid bombings, they are saying it again and the media are writing the same things. It is not true. Now they say that I fled from London, but this is not true. I'm here."

Mr. Guerbozi said he offered to speak with the British police, but they did not accept his offer. "I'm not in the mountains and I'm not in the forest," he said. "I'm in hiding and the intelligence service and the police know where I am."

EMAIL SPYING 'COULD HAVE STOPPED KILLERS'
► Observer
► Guardian
► CCISS / by Martin Rudner

Jul 10 2005 ► Jul 9. Millions of personal email and mobile phone records could be stored and shared with police and intelligence officials across Europe to help thwart terrorist attacks.

The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, will propose new measures at an emergency meeting of European Union interior ministers which will discuss the implications of Thursday's London bombings.

He raised the stakes dramatically by claiming they could 'quite possibly' have helped prevent such attacks, by identifying in advance suspicious patterns of behaviour by potential terrorists.

The move comes as The Observer can also reveal that the National Crime Squad has contacted internet service providers in the UK, appealing for them to preserve email messages in case they prove useful to the manhunt. The messages could include highly personal information.
Although police have no powers to force compliance, the memo sent last Thursday suggests it is 'likely that the perpetrators behind the multiple explosions in central London today have used telecommunications systems in the planning and execution of their act', and there was a risk of evidence being lost.

Clarke's proposals for an EU-wide agreement would stop short of such intrusion into the content of emails. But it would require the storing of revealing 'traffic data' - detailing who has called, or messaged whom, with times and locations - for several years, enabling individuals to be tracked across Europe and emerging networks of sympathisers to be monitored.

The Home Office is also pushing for tracking of lost or stolen explosives across the EU, to prevent terrorists getting access to the raw materials of bombs; access to EU databases by law enforcement agencies across the EU; and greater co-operation on tracking stolen passports, which can be used by terrorists to create new identities.

With emotions running high over the bombings, the move will trigger debate about the impact on civil liberties. However, he said Britain and Spain - which has backed the cause since the Madrid bombing - wanted it finalised by the end of the year.

'Terrorism today is by definition international: the more we can survey the way in which people operate, the way in which they make their phone calls, the better your chance of identifying patterns of behaviour which are a threat,' he said. Asked if such measures would have helped prevent the London bombing, he said: 'I think it's quite possible, actually.'

Whitehall sources said intelligence services around the world had also been asked to share any 'chatter' about the bombing.

Clarke also pledged to review draft plans for a crackdown on so-called 'acts preparatory to terrorism' - expected to include new offences of associating with a known terror suspect, targeting terrorist sympathisers - to see whether further measures are required. A new counter-terrorism bill had been almost complete when the bombers struck.

Controversial plans to have suspected terrorists tried by a security-vetted judge and defence lawyer, who would secretly examine evidence submitted by the intelligence services and not seen by the defendant, are on hold. Clarke is said to regard it as too drastic a change to be introduced in the bill due in the autumn.

Both the Tories and Liberal Democrats said they would continue to oppose the identity cards legislation currently before the Commons, although privately Labour MPs admit the parliamentary revolt may now be diminished.

Clarke admitted he cannot claim that ID cards would have prevented the bombing, although he argues that in Spain, where they are compulsory, they helped trace the alleged perpetrators, via their mobile phones, which Spaniards can buy only after producing an ID card.

The data retention proposal would require the saving of millions of pages of personal information for several years: the exact amount of time would be agreed between EU member states, but the UK is thought to favour a minimum of five years. Similar proposals have been opposed by the EU in the past.

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said some EU countries including Germany were likely to resist. 'There are some celebrated cases where we know, for example, that traffic data and mobile location has been useful to the police,' he said.

'But this is mass surveillance at its crudest.' It would lead to 'information overload', he said, stockpiling masses of useless information.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, warned in an interview yesterday that civil liberties should not be sacrificed in the rush to defend Britain. 'The best defence of security is to have the liberties,' he said. 'The first act of the liberation fighter is to try to force the state to do repressive things, because when the state does repressive things it recruits your supporters.'

Sources close to Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, said that his party would continue to defend civil liberties vigorously but responsibly. A source said: 'Everything is going to be influenced by what has happened, but the fundamental principles of civil liberties remain as ingrained as they ever were.'

Clarke, speaking before another meeting of the Cabinet emergency committee yesterday, said the first priority was the criminal investigation.

'The principal problem is getting forensic data that stacks up from the crime scenes themselves,' he said. 'They are appalling scenes and it is very difficult to get the material which can identify who committed these acts and why.'

He said nothing had been ruled in or out, including the possibility of a suicide bomber, and pledged 'a very close examination' of the handling of intelligence prior to the attack.

However, Downing Street sources stressed that the Prime Minister did not blame the intelligence services and said a formal inquiry into what went wrong was not a high priority: 'Although they will review the situation, their first task at the moment is to find out who did it.'

THE HATE
► Sunday Times / by David Leppard and Nick Fielding [additional reporting: Matthew Campbell, Hala
Jaber, Christina Lamb, Robert Winnett]
► CCISS / by Martin Rudner

Jul 10 2005 ► Jul 9. Who planted the London bombs? Experts believe a new generation of angry young British Muslims has spawned its own terrorists.

Early last year, as Tony Blair struggled through the long and bitter political aftermath of the Iraq war, yet another bit of disturbing news turned up in his red boxes. A discussion paper prepared by senior civil servants, it raised a subject that last week came back to haunt him.

"The home secretary and the foreign secretary," he read, "have commissioned [this] paper for the prime minister on how to prevent British Muslims, especially young Muslims, from becoming attracted to extremist movements and terrorist activity."

The 36-page paper was littered with misspellings, bad grammar and the egregious waffle that the civil service has learnt from new Labour - "We have a 10-point action plan on engaging with ethnic minorities" - but it dealt presciently with the home-grown terrorism that the police and MI5 believe lies behind last Thursday's bomb outrages in London.

Focusing on young Muslims "who were either born in the UK or who have significant ties to it rather than those who have acquired British nationality more recently", the paper spelt out the disillusionment that might turn a Muslim loner into a bomber.

The prime minister read: "Often disaffected lone individuals unable to fit into their community will be attracted to university clubs based on ethnicity or religion, or be drawn to mosques or preaching groups in prison through a sense of disillusionment with their current existence."

The paper continued: "Policy should have two main aims: (a) to isolate extremists within the Muslim community, and . . . (b) to help young Muslims from becoming ensnared or bullied into participation in terrorist or extremist activity."

This was Whitehall's long-term counter-terrorist strategy codenamed Project Contest. As a strategy it can hardly be qualified as a success after last week's outrages, but it certainly identified the problem.

Intelligence experts and Islamic leaders agree that Thursday July 7 marks the bloody emergence of home-grown Islamic terrorism in Britain rather than the arrival of Al-Qaeda's bombers on these shores. The favourite hypothesis of investigators is that the bomb teams comprised a cell of some eight or nine young British Muslims, led by a foreign-born "talisman" figure who controlled and directed them.

"This is a very worrying situation," said M J Gohel, head of the London-based Asia Pacific Foundation which monitors Islamic terrorism. "We're looking at a new generation of terrorists, people who are not directly linked to Osama Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda so they can slip under the net of the security services. These are people born or brought up in western Europe, so they fit in but are infected by Bin Laden's ideology."

His view was echoed by a former radical who sometimes leads prayers at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London where Abu Hamza, the blind hook-armed cleric, used to preach. "There is a growing phenomenon of angry young Muslims in Britain," said this man, who wished to remain anonymous. "I get many young people who watch Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya [the satellite TV channels] coming to me after Friday prayers saying they have seen the atrocities at Abu Ghraib or the defacing of Korans at Guantanamo and what should they do.

"I tell them to study, take care of their own lives, that if they are angry with George Bush or Tony Blair there is no point killing innocent people in Oxford Street. But there may be many more going to crazy people who tell them to take matters into their own hands. There is an absolute majority among Muslims who share the anti-US sentiment of Al-Qaeda and it is easy to harness that."

Who are these young British terrorists and why do they readily fall under the influence of "crazy people"? How are they recruited? How do they operate? What have the police and MI5 done to try to catch them? And are the non-violent majority of Muslim religious activists in Britain the real key to defeating them?

IN THE aftermath of September 11, 2001, British intelligence analysts warned ministers about a new breed of terrorist recruit.

Increasingly, hundreds of young Muslim men, most of them British born, were being drawn to the cause of fundamentalism. Radical websites and imams in mosques in London, Luton, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester were preaching holy war to disaffected young Muslims who were looking for a purpose.

Unlike the September 11 hijackers, the new terrorists did not have a rigid leadership structure. The majority of them had no criminal record and did not appear on any intelligence data bases linking them to terrorism. They were, in effect, "clean skins" and they were much more difficult to detect.

To counteract this danger, Project Contest was born in Whitehall. Its purpose was set out by Sir Andrew Turnbull, the cabinet secretary, in a letter to permanent secretaries at key government departments in April last year. He wrote: "The aim is to prevent terrorism by tackling its causes to diminish support for terrorists by influencing social and economic issues." Referring to the role played in this by radical preachers such as Abu Qatada (also known as Abu Omar), Turnbull explained: "Al-Qaeda and its offshoots provide a dramatic pole of attraction for the most disaffected."

Of particular concern was that the Islamist terrorist recruiters were targeting the poor and the jobless. An official audit provided to the Project Contest working committee showed that Muslims were three times more likely to be unemployed than the population as a whole.

Surveillance of the Muslim community by MI5 and Special Branch found that extremist groups were also operating within universities to recruit middle-class students. A small group of postgraduates at Imperial College and others at Brunel University in west London were of particular concern.
The paper prepared for the prime minister spelt out the breadth of the problem: "By extremism, we mean advocating or supporting views such as support for terrorist attacks against British or western targets, including the 9/11 attacks, or for British Muslims fighting against British and allied forces abroad, arguing that it is not possible to be Muslim and British, calling on Muslims to reject engagement with British society and politics, and advocating the creation of an Islamic state in Britain."

It stated that "a small number of young British Muslims are known to have committed or participated in terrorism abroad a number of extremist groups operate in the UK and seek to recruit young Muslims and an increasing number of British Muslims, often young, have needed UK consular services after being detained on suspicion of terrorist or extremist activity in other parts of the world (eg Yemen, Egypt and the US)". The paper cited an intelligence estimate that the number of British Muslims engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad, or supporting it, was "less than 1%" of the UK's Muslim population of 1.6m. But that suggests that up to 16,000 may be involved - a numbing figure.

It went on to explain why these thousands of potential terrorists remain below the security radar: "Whilst many have grown up in Muslim households, a significant number come from liberal, non- religious Muslim backgrounds or only converted to Islam in adulthood. These converts include white British nationals and those of West Indian extraction.

"By and large most young extremists fall into one of two groups: well educated - undergraduates or with degrees and technical professional qualifications in engineering or IT - or under-achievers with few or no qualifications and often a criminal background.

"The former group is often targeted by extremist recruiters circulating among university-based religious or ethnic societies. Among the latter group some are drawn to mosques where they may be targeted by extremist preachers; others are radicalised or converted while in prison.

"However, a significant number of young radicalised British Muslims have been recruited through a single contact, often by chance, outside either of these environments. Such individuals are encouraged to maintain a low profile for operational purposes and do not develop the network of associates or political doctrines common to many other extremist Islamists."

One former radical insisted last week that recruitment is no longer taking place in mosques or Islamic organisations - which are now largely under the control of "moderates" - but in pubs, discos and casinos.

The exporting of home-grown jihadis - and their fanaticism - was confirmed in Iraq last month by a senior insurgent commander, "Abu Ahmad", who revealed that about 70 volunteers had arrived from Britain. Two had been killed fighting alongside him against American troops.
One of these, a 22-year-old known as Abu Hareth, had been born in Britain of Iraqi parents. He was killed in fighting in Falluja in April last year.

"When the battle intensified and due to his lack of military experience I asked him to take shelter in a basement. He refused my advice and told me off for asking him to hide and he said, 'I will hold this against you when the day of reckoning comes for you tried to prevent me from attaining martyrdom'," Abu Ahmad said.

Two brothers - Ammar, 22, and Yasser, 18 - arrived in Iraq from Britain after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003: "They could not wait to go out and fight and kept on asking when they will go into battle."

After about a month, Ammar was killed fighting American troops: "His younger brother Yasser, who witnessed Ammar's death, surprised us by shedding tears of joy and praising Allah for his brother's martyrdom."

The commander continued: "When we returned to our base we asked Yasser to return home, telling him it was enough that his family had lost one son; it would not be right if the second son was also killed and that there were others who would fight on his behalf here.

"But he refused and told us: 'What would I tell my mother? She will not accept me in the house for when she bid us farewell she told us either to return victorious or to achieve martyrdom. I cannot return. I have to finish off what Ammar my brother started here, and anyway I do not want to leave my brother all alone in this land. I want to be buried with him'. And he began to cry."

Abu Ahmad said that having been ordered home, Yasser wrote a letter revealing that when he had arrived in Britain his mother had celebrated on hearing about Ammar's death - "ululating with happiness and calling her friends and relatives to tell them the good news. She distributed sweets and juices in celebration to all those that came to pay their respect".

BRITISH politicians, civil servants and counter-terrorism specialists have been trying to tackle this fanaticism through a mixture of hearts-and-minds projects and increased policing.

Project Contest has led to new laws to curb the immigration of radical imams to Britain and to the controversial proposals, now before parliament, to outlaw incitement to religious hatred. Other initiatives included more government funding for moderate Islamic newspapers, television and radio stations. Measures to create "Muslim friendly" workplaces with more prayer rooms were proposed as well as special mortgages that would enable Muslims, barred by the religion from paying interest, to buy their own council houses.

At the same time, more resources have been allocated to detecting and preventing terrorist attacks. The sheer size of the pool of potential recruits has presented the police and MI5 with an enormous challenge, however.

After the September 11 attacks it quickly became apparent that the intelligence services were woefully understaffed. Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was made director-general of MI5 in October 2002, ran a successful Whitehall lobbying campaign to win funds for another 1,000 officers, a 50% increase in MI5's staffing.

The Metropolitan police special branch SO12, which carries out covert security operations against terrorism, also underwent a rapid expansion, increasing its staffing to more than 800 officers.

In the aftermath of the attacks on America there was, in the words of one senior police officer last week, "a huge intelligence gap". But in the past three years, he added, that gap had closed significantly as the understanding grew of how Al-Qaeda operated. By the beginning of this year there were some 2,500 Special Branch officers spread across England and Wales, with more than 700 in Scotland.

Since September 11 there have been more than 700 arrests of terrorist suspects. Critics of the stepped-up security point out that there have been only 17 convictions - and just three of these were linked to Al-Qaeda related activity.

That, critics said, suggested an over-reaction by the authorities. But insiders say that the figures reflected a deliberate policy. In the past, counter-terrorist operations against the IRA's bombing campaigns would see suspects being followed for months before sufficient evidence was gathered to arrest them.

The IRA had a relatively small number of known operatives whose movements were relatively easy to track. But Al-Qaeda and its affiliates posed an unspecified, mostly unknown and little understood threat of a catastrophic attack in which thousands of people might be killed.

In those circumstances it was decided that no risks would be taken: policing was designed to disrupt and destabilise terrorist activity before it could result in the loss of lives. That meant arresting people as soon as they became known as terrorist suspects. The priority was not gathering evidence for any future court case but protecting the country from attack.

Recently, senior police and intelligence officials became confident that they had "broken the back" of the Al-Qaeda threat to Britain. With the apparent closing of the "intelligence gap", a more relaxed mood of confidence began to percolate throughout the intelligence community. Earlier this year the security services began to talk about reverting to the old IRA policy of letting suspects run before launching raids to arrest them.

At the same time as this new arrest policy gained ascendancy in Whitehall security circles, analysts began to observe a change in the type of suspect being arrested from foreign-born to British. Trials at the Old Bailey next year will reveal that the majority of the defendants are British citizens.

The vast majority of suspects now on MI5's watch list have no previous involvement with terrorism. And not being watched at all are the army of "clean skins" or "lily-whites" whose existence is suspected by the authorities but who are still unidentified. It is these invisible young men who may have formed the backbone of the terror cell that struck the heart of London on Thursday morning.

There are various reasons for believing that they were not Al-Qaeda operatives. Intelligence sources say that the organisation claiming responsibility after the attacks, the Secret Organisation of Al-Qaeda in Europe, has not previously shown up on their radar screens beyond one mention on a website when they were demanding the withdrawal of Bulgarian troops from Iraq.

According to one former associate of Bin Laden, the wording of their statement was unusual. "Their description of the Prophet and also referring to an Arabic nation was not part of the culture of Al-Qaeda," he said. "I think the attack was carried out by admirers of Bin Laden, not associates. He has become this kind of iconic hero to a lot of disgruntled people. They have probably never met him or anyone close to him."

Other sources pointed out that Al-Qaeda is now a loose umbrella organisation since the post-September ll crackdowns and many extremist groups are using the Al-Qaeda handle. "Everyone is flying in the air when they talk of Al-Qaeda," agreed one former member now living in London. "We can't say who is a leader, who is not, so there is an open window for anyone to claim they are."
THE ROOT of the problem in the eyes of many foreign security operatives remains London's reputation as a haven for extremists.

"It may not be the moment to say it," said a defence ministry official in Paris, "but London is paying for its mistakes, for allowing all those radical organisations from Saudis to Pakistanis to set up shop in London, put out newsletters, make recruits and gather funds to finance their activities."

Young men from Algeria and Morocco, including members of Islamist armed organisations, came to Britain in the early 1990s to escape persecution by the security forces in their home countries. They were granted asylum and some have since lived on welfare. Supporters of the Armed Islamic Group, known then as the GIA, used mosques such as Finsbury Park and Brixton, in south London, to raise funds to buy guns and bankroll a terror campaign that cost tens of thousands of lives in Algeria. They engaged in blackmail, drug dealing and credit card fraud to support their fundraising in London, Manchester and Birmingham.

In April 1994, after raids on GIA suspects in Paris, police found documents said to be "GIA communiqués" sanctioning the murder of Algerian police officers. Fax numbers were traced to London addresses in Southall, Mile End, Brixton, Finsbury Park and Richmond. A French investigating magistrate came to London to try to interview eight of those linked to the documents. But he was apparently blocked by the British authorities.

The French were so concerned about the role of the GIA and other groups in London that they authorised illegal spying operations against them in London - without telling the British.

Reda Hassaine, an Algerian journalist who came to Britain in the early 1990s, ended up working for MI5 and French intelligence, reporting on radicals inside the Muslim community. But Hassaine believes that despite huge efforts, the government and the security forces have been been far too complacent in dealing with the threat.

For more than a decade, Hassaine says, Britain has been a "soft touch" for Islamist radicals who used it as a fundraising and propaganda base to launch attacks in Algeria and elsewhere: "The groups here now are much more independent of each other. There are plenty of them and they've been here in London for a long time."

One former Algerian jihadi may hold the answer to the terrorist threat. When he was 24, Abdullah Anas reached a turning point in his life. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood and an imam, he had been brought up on stories of the long war for Algeria's independence from France. Now he decided it was his turn to take up the gun for a cause: in his case, jihad.

Anas travelled to Peshawar in Pakistan and then walked for 40 days to northern Afghanistan. He lost most of his toenails, but "I felt I was reborn when I first got there . . . Even though I was sick for 10 days, I was so happy to be walking along with my Kalashnikov and with my brothers".

He fought there for eight years, becoming close to Bin Laden. But he was eventually disillusioned. "I am proud God chose me to be part of that holy war. I went there prepared to become a martyr. But it was very sad for me to see that once they had liberated their own land, they were unable to build their country. It was a big lesson for me," he said last week.

"I realised that Muslims can win the battle, but can't stabilise afterwards and win the peace. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw the same in Algeria, where my father and grandfather fought for freedom from the French, but once we had it, it fell to pieces. The Muslim fighters know how to die, but not how to live."

Anas was among the wave of Algerians receiving asylum in Britain. He learnt English and now works as a company secretary and teaches Arabic and Koranic studies. The board of trustees running Finsbury Park mosque since the overthrow of its radical regime regularly invites him to preach to congregations of 1,000.

His message is both outspokenly Muslim and adamantly against violence. London is a safe haven for Muslims, he says: "In some ways London is the closest thing we can get to the society described by the Koran. God said, I created you as many nations, tribes and languages. That is what we have here. None of us should seek to impose our views or values on the other."

He says this way of relating to life in London, as set down by the Prophet, is not simply a choice: "It is an obligation. We are part of this society and I tell my congregations that this is why I want them to know what the Prophet himself did. "Anyone targeting this society is my enemy. They are targeting me and my family as much as anyone else, no matter who they are." He added: "Like many Muslims I am angered by what the Americans are doing in Iraq or the Israelis do in Palestine. But injustices must be dealt with by scholars and politicians, not by hotheads. "These recruiters and terrorists, they are simply trying to use the anger of the young for their own agenda. Of course there is anger, but these criminals are trying to pervert it. I am not a hypocrite or an agent either of the United States or Bin Laden. This is my religion, what I believe in."

TURNING FROM BRITAIN'S YOUTH CULTURE TO ISLAM'S CERTAINTIES
► Sunday Times / Giles Hattersley

The biggest division among Britain's youth is no longer class, it's religion. For one group there is MSN, the X-box, T4, Jay-Z, Diamond White, Pot Noodles, Maybelline Great Lash mascara and sex. For the other there are five daily prayers, hijab, arranged marriages, a lifelong relationship with Allah and the spectres of honour killings and terrorism.

"We try not to separate ourselves," said Nirma Muslim, an 18-year-old Leicester schoolgirl. "But I have to admit that the majority of places me and my friends go are Islamic."
Is it that Muslim children have become more religious than their parents? Professor Akbar Ahmed, the world's leading authority on contemporary Islam, first noticed a shift towards militancy here in the 1980s. "The Muslim generation of the Sixties were more interested in making a name for themselves on the cricket field or in the literary field but now the equivalent generation want to make a name for themselves by going out and fighting a physical and violent jihad in the name of Islam."

Why? "Unlike American Muslims, British Muslims tend towards a much closer relationship with their motherlands and live in more detached communities. Because of globalisation, technology, and the media, they also have a sense of being a 'global Muslim'."

Zubair Patel, a 19-year-old Muslim of Indian descent studying for his A-levels at Regent sixth-form college in Leicester, thinks a generation of young men and women now of university age were shaped by 9/11.

"If you dressed like a Muslim at that time, people would hassle you in the street. It forced us to look for an identity and ask, 'Do I want to be in the mainstream or do I want to say I am Muslim?'" He started wearing the shalwar kameez (with a Burberry sweatshirt and a Prada beanie).

"I am not one of those Muslims who take part in the whole western thing, like drinking and drugs," he said. "Those people get portrayed as the moderate Muslims - like that's what you should be like if you're living in Britain."

"Some people get tempted to join in," said his friend Rabi Miah, 17. "But you have to look within yourself and decide that instead of a club you go out for dinner with your friends."
Zubair said: "I've been back to where my parents grew up in India and in their neighbourhood they had two mosques. Here we have four mosques on our street and an Islamic boarding school on the corner. They had two scholars, Leicester has 165. England has given us a greater chance to become more devout than our parents."

"It's sad in a sense, though," said Nirma. "Although we were born and brought up here, we are not experiencing Britain." "But what's the alternative?" asked Zubair. "Going clubbing and getting high?" He confessed: "I'd like to find it within myself to go up to any non-Muslim on the street and say, 'This is who I am. Who are you? Lets have a chat'." "It's harder to do than it sounds, though," said Rabi Miah.
As a child, Na'ima B Robert liked carol singing but never thought of herself as religious. "I was nominally feminist, and when I went on a trip to Egypt after a really wild summer before my second year of university I was bothered by the women in hijab. It was only when I asked one of them why she was covering up that it hit me. She said, 'I want to be judged for what I say and what I do - not what I look like'."

A year later Na'ima converted to Islam. A year after that she had guardians arrange a marriage. She felt liberated by her religion, and joined a growing number of Islamic feminists who feel hijab frees them from having to rely on beauty as their primary currency.

"Anyone who's ever smelt the reek of vomit on the side of the road can understand a little bit of the sense in the Koran," she said. "But more than that Islam answered the biggest question you have as a young person, 'Why are we here?'" Her friends and family were less pleased with her transformation. "My father was very upset. He felt like he would lose his daughter to Islam. Socially, my university friends and me were left with little in common. My religion is not something you do for two hours on a Friday. It's holistic and hard to sustain when you're not around people who help you."

LEAKED NO 10 DOSSIER REVEALS AL QAEDA’S BRITISH RECRUITS
► Sunday Times / by Robert Winnett and David Leppard

Jul 10 2005 ► Jul 10. Al Qaeda is secretly recruiting affluent middle class Muslims in British universities and colleges to carry out terrorists attacks in this country leaked Whiteholl documents reveal.

A network of “extremist recruiters” is circulating on campuses targeting people with “technical and professional qualifications”, particularly engineering and IT degrees.
Yesterday it emerged that last week’s London bombings were a sophisticated attack with all the devices detonating on the Underground within 50 seconds of each other. The police believe those behind the outrage may be home-grown British terrorists with no criminal backgrounds and possessing technical expertise.

A joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier, Young Muslims and Extremism, prepared for the prime minister last year, said Britain might now be harbouring thousands of Al-Qaeda sympathisers.

Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police chief, revealed separately last night that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.

The Whitehall dossier, ordered by Tony Blair following last year’s train bombings in Madrid, says: “Extremists are known to target schools and colleges where young people may be very inquisitive but less challenging and more susceptible to extremist reasoning/ arguments.”

The confidential assessment, covering more than 100 pages of letters, papers and other documents, forms the basis of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, codenamed Operation Contest.

It paints a chilling picture of the scale of the task in tackling terrorism. Drawing on information from MI5, it concludes: “Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.”

This equates to fewer than 16,000 potential terrorists and supporters out of a Muslim population of almost 1.6m.

The dossier also estimates that 10,000 have attended extremist conferences. The security services believe that the number who are prepared to commit terrorist attacks may run into hundreds.

Most of the Al-Qaeda recruits tend to be loners “attracted to university clubs based on ethnicity or religion” because of “disillusionment with their current existence”. British-based terrorists are made up of different ethnic groups, according to the documents.

“They range from foreign nationals now naturalised and resident in the UK, arriving mainly from north Africa and the Middle East, to second and third generation British citizens whose forebears mainly originate from Pakistan or Kashmir.

“In addition . . . a significant number come from liberal, non-religious Muslim backgrounds or (are) only converted to Islam in adulthood. These converts include white British nationals and those of West Indian extraction.”

The Iraq war is identified by the dossier as a key cause of young Britons turning to terrorism. The analysis says: “It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment among Muslims, including young Muslims, is a perceived ‘double standard’ in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and the US.

“The perception is that passive ‘oppression’, as demonstrated in British foreign policy, eg non-action on Kashmir and Chechnya, has given way to ‘active oppression’. The war on terror, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all seen by a section of British Muslims as having been acts against Islam.”

In an interview yesterday, Blair denied that the London terrorist attacks were a direct result of British involvement in the Iraq war. He said Russia had suffered terrorism with the Beslan school massacre despite its opposition to the war, and terrorists were planning further attacks on Spain even after the pro-war government was voted out.

“September 11 happened before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before any of these issues and that was the worst terrorist atrocity of all,” he said.

However, the analysis prepared for Blair identified Iraq as a “recruiting sergeant” for extremism.
The Sunday Times has learnt that Britain is negotiating with Australia to hand over military command of southern Iraq to release British troops for redeployment in Afghanistan.

The plan behind Operation Contest has been to win over Muslim “hearts and minds” with policy initiatives including anti-religious discrimination laws. A meeting of Contest officials this week is expected to consider a radical overhaul of the strategy following the London attacks.

Stevens said last night at least eight attacks aimed at civilian targets on the British mainland had been foiled in the past five years and that none had been planned by the same gang.

The former Scotland Yard chief, who retired earlier this year, said that on one weekend more than 1,000 undercover officers had been deployed, monitoring a group of suspected terrorists.

He said that he believed last week’s attackers were almost certainly British-born, “brought up here and totally aware of British life and values”.

“There’s a sufficient number of people in this country willing to be Islamic terrorists that they don’t have to be drafted in from abroad,” he said.

THE CHANGING FACE OF AL-QAIDA: "OUTSOURCING" TERROR
► The Washington Post
► The Baltimore Sun
► The Seattle Times

Jul 10 2005 ► Jul 8. If al-Qaida turns out to have been behind yesterday's bombings in London, as British officials suggested, it would be further evidence of the changing face of the extremist group, terrorism analysts said. Al-Qaida, they said, is global, opportunistic, fragmented — and still very potent. The group's battle against Western society is both a war and an evolving propaganda campaign.

Since 9/11, the pace of al-Qaida-sponsored attacks has quickened. They are now occurring globally at a rate of approximately once every three months, compared with less than once a year prior to 2001, according to Brian Jenkins, who has studied terrorism for more than three decades.
At the same time, the number of casualties in each attack has been lower, he added.

These newer, smaller attacks are part of an emerging strategy by al-Qaida, said Michael Scheuer, a former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit and better known as the author of "Imperial Hubris," which critiqued the government's anti-terror policies.

The older part of the al-Qaida strategy, the more massive, 9/11-style attacks, often involved many years of planning. The second, more recent phase, is part of a violent campaign against U.S. allies that al-Qaida has vowed to attack.

"This is a whole different campaign," Scheuer said of attacks in Madrid, in Bali and elsewhere "This is designed to attack our allies."

Now more a brand than a tight-knit group, al-Qaida has responded to four years of intense pressure from the United States and its allies by dispersing its surviving operatives, distributing its ideology and techniques for mass-casualty attacks to a wide audience on the Web, and encouraging new adherents to act spontaneously in its name.

As in the Madrid rail bombings, these looser adherents sometimes copy al-Qaida's signature method of simultaneous explosions against symbolic or economic targets, an approach repeatedly advocated by al-Qaida founder bin Laden in his recent recorded speeches. Al-Qaida's evolution from headquarters-planned conspiracies toward diffuse ideological incitement and tactical support is consistent with bin Laden's long-stated goal.

For years, bin Laden has emphasized his desire to be remembered as a vanguard, an inspiring leader whose spark would light a spreading fire among all the world's Muslims, causing them to revolt en masse against Christians, Jews and their allies in the Middle East. During the past year, the thinking of bin Laden and other key fugitive leaders — as communicated in taped addresses and on password-protected Internet message boards — has been influenced by the course of the war in Iraq. Last November, Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi pledged allegiance to bin Laden, and by doing so created at least the appearance of a unified al-Qaida approach to the war.

Indeed, al-Zarqawi's pledge to bin Laden has offered a model of the new kind of al-Qaida outsourcing. "From al-Qaida's point of view, it makes it look like they're in on the biggest action going right now in Iraq," said a former U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "From Zarqawi's point of view, it's brand recognition — you're a franchisee."

Both bin Laden and al-Zarqawi have emphasized two prominent themes in their approach to the Iraq war: driving a wedge between the United States and its allies, and bleeding American and allied economies.
Bin Laden and some of his lieutenants have strongly emphasized economic issues related to Iraq in recent postings and speeches. In his videotaped speech to the American people last November, on the eve of the U.S. election, he boasted of "the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan."

In waging these smaller attacks, Scheuer said, al-Qaida is trying to turn the people of those countries against their U.S.-aligned government. If the attacks were much larger, he said, they would risk rallying those countries around their governments. But that should not comfort Americans, he cautioned. "They're saving the big one for us. We are their main enemy," he said. "The people who assume this is all they can do are kind of whistling past the graveyard."

Other analysts said there is a perception, deserved or not, that the United States is harder to penetrate, so al Qaeda-inspired jihadists are going elsewhere — for now.

The smaller attacks also keep the group and their cause in the public eye, said Jenkins. "In the meantime, it is imperative for them that they continue operations not simply for what it does to us, but for what it does for them," Jenkins said, namely, attracting new fighters and financing.

The group that claimed responsibility for the bombings, "Secret Organization of al-Qaida in Europe," is unknown to analysts who track terrorism, and government officials have not yet identified the perpetrators of the attacks. This new organization would fit the post-9/11 trend of al-Qaida's becoming a movement of loosely affiliated, ad-hoc groups.

The European terror infrastructure may actually be expanding. Freshly trained terrorists, or jihadists, appear to be returning to Europe from the war in Iraq, said David Kay, former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. Thomas Sanderson, deputy director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, has spent the past several months researching Kay's concern.

"There's no doubt about it that there could be a connection" between the London bombings and the Iraq-trained jihadists migration to Europe, he said. He cautioned, however, nothing can be said conclusively until more is known about who was behind the attacks.

"I do not really believe there is such a thing as al-Qaida, the organization; there is al-Qaida, the mindset," said Yosri Fouda, senior investigative reporter in London for the al-Jazeera satellite television network, the only journalist known to have interviewed Sept. 11 planners Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. "This is what I find much scarier. Your ability to predict is reduced to a minimal level."

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