Months ago Manish wrote about the ethnic slur “Paki.” In Britain this is the slur of choice when referring to all people of South Asian ethnicity. Brace yourselves. SM tipster Prem Khalon has been sending us the latest news clippings on the London bomb blasts. From the Timesonline:
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.
Another Times article goes into more detail about the bombers:
All were from suburbs orbiting Leeds, a city with a strong Muslim community, many of them with their family links in Pakistan.
Hussain was described by friends in Leeds as a tearaway. He drank and dated British women before being sent to Pakistan to visit relations. On his return he was said to have become a devout Muslim, turning his back on his previous life.
A neighbour of Tanweer last night told ITN news last night that he had spent four months in Lahore, Pakistan, and two months in Afghanistan. The neighbour, who did not want to be identified, said: He was a good lad from a good family.
Police refused to disclose last night whether the personal property found on the bombers included any clues as to the militant group behind this attack. There was obvious pressure on Scotland Yard and the security services immediately to mount armed raids on the mens home addresses to reassure a nervous public that they knew who was responsible for the murder of more than 50 people.
Instead they waited, checking with agents in Pakistan what, if anything, was known about the four, or whether there were links with militant groups operating here. The security authorities wanted to establish how many more would-be suicide bombers were part of this cell.
Seems like a very tried and true pattern. If what his friends say was true, then Hussain sounds like a classic case of a born-again, brainwashed fundamentalist. The fact they were upper middle class and one had an 8 month old baby who he so easily made fatherless, should scare the heck out of the Brits, and all of us.
