Monday, Aug. 01, 2005

The Terrorists Next Door

By J.F.O. McAllister/London

Like most Londoners, residents of the Peabody housing estate have become used to seeing cops on the street, reminders that their city is under threat. The war came home last week. "We won't hurt you!" a group of armed police shouted to men sheltering inside a fourth-floor apartment in a block of red-brick buildings. The officers had staked out the complex for hours, believing that two of the men wanted for the unsuccessful attempt to bomb the city's transportation system on July 21 were hiding inside. When the suspects failed to give themselves up, witnesses say, the officers stuck a strip of plastic explosive around the edge of the apartment door and blew it off. A bare-chested man emerged, his arms in the air, and was led away. Police fired tear gas into the house, and two more shirtless men appeared on the balcony, vomiting and spitting from the gas. To ensure that the men could not detonate themselves, the police told them to remove their pants, then hauled the suspects away.

Beamed around the world, the raid in west London was the most dramatic confrontation yet between British authorities and Muslim extremists since four of them detonated bombs during the morning rush hour on July 7, killing 52. The perpetrators perished with their victims, but the arrests last week of all four suspects in the failed July 21 bombing--who apparently had intended to inflict carnage on a comparable scale--provided a measure of relief to a jittery city. In Birmingham, in the center of England, police snared Yasin Hassan Omar, allegedly the man shown on closed-circuit-television tapes who was planning to bomb the Warren Street underground station. The Peabody bust netted Ibrahim Muktar Said, suspected of trying to bomb a bus in east London, and Ramzi Mohammed, who fled from the Oval station after allegedly leaving a bomb. And in Italy, authorities announced they had caught Osman Hussain (also referred to as Hussain Osman by British police), who is alleged to have tried to blow up a train at the Shepherd's Bush tube stop.

"The investigation has moved with some speed," British antiterrorism-police chief Peter Clarke said Friday, "but it is still continuing." Nonetheless, a lot of loose ends remain. Despite the spectacular arrests, the review of more than 35,000 closed-circuit-television tapes and more than 5,000 leads phoned in by the public on the antiterrorist hot line--police have asked people to program the number into their cell phones--investigators don't have a clear understanding of the dimensions of the twin terrorist plots. British and U.S. officials told TIME that police have not found any forensic link between the July 7 and July 21 bombers--no phone calls, documents or other evidence tying the two groups together. Contrary to earlier speculation, the bombs used on July 7 and July 21 came from different batches of homemade explosive, says a British official, which means either the same "chemist" made different batches or more than one chemist is still on the loose. It remains unclear how--or even whether--each team is linked to al-Qaeda, and this raises the chilling specter of multiple jihadist cells operating on their own. A U.S. counterterrorism official says the British and U.S. governments are open to the idea that the two attacks "may have been planned independently of each other."

The most pressing question is whether a wider network of accomplices is at large. After the July 21 attacks, investigators discovered a fifth, abandoned bomb in a field in west London as well as 16 bomb components in the trunk of the car left at Luton train station by the July 7 suicide bombers. Hussain has told Italian investigators that his July 21 gang had nothing to do with the July 7 cell and progressed to terrorism without any contact with al-Qaeda except what the members read on the Internet, according to Italian news reports. British officials are taking seriously that the terrorists were homegrown. Shane Brighton, an expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says "self-radicalization" has been a mounting concern to terror experts. "If you already accept that there's a historic struggle between Muslims and the West and that the only resort is violence," he says, "all you need to do is watch the news to have your mind-set reconfirmed." Those who have self-radicalized can easily resort to "Google terror"--turn to the Internet for bomb recipes, how-to videos and moral support--and thus slip beneath the radar of the security services.

For the July 21 terrorists, there was disaffection aplenty in Britain to prime them for violence. Omar, 24, the alleged bomber caught in Birmingham, came to Britain as a dependent of his elder sister when he was 11. In London, Omar moved through a series of foster homes and attended a school with a truancy rate three times the national average. By the time he turned 18, he was sufficiently troubled to be declared a "vulnerable young adult" by social services and was moved into a one-bedroom apartment on the ninth floor of a grim north London apartment building called Curtis House, which is home to a large immigrant population. Omar lived off state benefits worth at least $150 a week, which stopped a few months ago, and began to slide toward Islamic radicalism. At a grocery store a few blocks from Curtis House, the Turkish owner's wife Nursal remembers talking to Omar about a terrorist attack by al-Qaeda, saying it was terrible. She recalls his reply: "Why is it terrible? Those people [the victims] are killing Muslims." A classmate says Omar "got religion three or four years ago and grew a beard. He changed. I think he was lonely, led away and brainwashed."

A few years ago Omar found a new housemate in Said, 27, a British citizen who arrived from Eritrea when he was 14. He served time in five juvenile jails after being convicted in 1996 for being part of a gang that robbed at knifepoint. Police believe that Omar and Said used their apartment as a bomb factory for the July 21 attacks. Nicola Hannay-Young, 15, who lives on the second floor, said Omar and Said and sometimes their friends "were in and out six or seven times a day. One of them had a dark blue plastic carrier bag that he carried very tightly." Traces of explosive were reportedly found in the building's garbage chute, and explosives were removed from Omar's apartment and a nearby garage.

The arrests of the July 21 bombing suspects may turn out to be easier than what comes next. Of the July 7 and July 21 suspects, only one had previously even tweaked the interest of the security services, implying that a lot more networks of homegrown terrorists could be out there--Pakistani, Somali, Eritrean, Jamaican, North African, perhaps many others in a country with 1.6 million Muslims. In a poll of British Muslims published last week, 4% of those surveyed said they believe "it is acceptable for religious or political groups to use violence for political ends." One official estimates there are at least 800 Muslims in Britain with jihadist leanings--half of whom are British citizens--who ought to be under surveillance or deported. Following last week's sweep, investigators are turning their attention to "the support networks for these men," says a police source. Until the networks are destroyed, says antiterrorism chief Clarke, "the threat remains and is very real." --Reported by Theunis Bates, Jessica Carsen and Helen Gibson/London, Lillian Kennett/Birmingham and Douglas Waller/ Washington

With reporting by Theunis Bates/London, Jessica Carsen/London, Helen Gibson/London, Lillian Kennett/Birmingham, DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON