This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/901
August 1, 2005
MIM: This four part article in the UK paper the Independent chronicles the attacks and the background of the attackers.
The attacks on London, Part One: The arrests
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article302747.ece
Caught: how the police got their men
Published: 31 July 2005
They came out choking on CS gas, their eyes streaming and their hands in the air. The men who had terrorised London were naked and terrified now, as police in body armour and intimidating gas masks trained the laser sights of their machine guns on them. And as the biggest manhunt in British police history reached its strange, apocalyptic climax live on television, satellites were tracking the last suspect to his hiding place on the other side of Europe.
But the arrest of all five bomb suspects was not down to hi-tech surveillance gizmos or futuristic weaponry, according to the head of the Metropolitan Police. It was about "good old-fashioned detective work".
And that is, indeed, the hidden story of an extraordinary week: how detectives working on tip-offs from the public, combing through the records and interviewing people in the street, just as they do on The Bill, tracked down the alleged terrorists. And when they found them, these men did not have the air of satanic glamour lent to them by those fuzzy, chilling CCTV grabs. They were ordinary looking, and they were captured in ordinary places, still living among us.
The first breakthrough came on 22 July, the day after four unexploded bombs were left in rucksacks at Warren Street, Shepherd's Bush and Oval stations and on a No 26 bus. The parents of Muktar Said Ibrahim looked at the CCTV images of the four suspects and realised that one of them, the alleged bus bomber, was their son. He lived apart from them, and had done for a while. They called the police.
The 27-year-old British Eritrean shared a flat in New Southgate, north London, with another suspect: Yasin Hassan Omar, 24, a Somalian British citizen who is suspected of trying to blow up a train at Warren Street. On the same day that Ibrahim's parents rang the police, a neighbour saw him back near the flat with Omar, acting suspiciously.
The one-bedroom, ninth-floor flat in Curtis House was let in the name of Omar, whose rent was paid by Enfield council. Last Monday the police raided the flat and arrested two men, but neither of them was a bomber. On Tuesday they searched a lock-up nearby, and found chemicals which could have been used to make bombs.
The next breakthrough came in the early hours of Wednesday morning when police raided two addresses in Birmingham and found Omar there. Rather than take the chance of shooting an innocent man dead, as they had a few days earlier, they immobilised him with a Taser stun gun capable of generating 50,000 volts of electricity. The muscles of its victim seize up in excruciating pain, but he can recover within 20 minutes. Omar was taken to Paddington Green high-security police station in London for questioning.
The previous Friday a man had been arrested in Stockwell, south London. Now, late on Wednesday, police returned there to arrest three women at a flat in Blair House. They were held on suspicion of harbouring offenders and taken away, along with three small children. One of the women arrested was Yeshiemebet Girma, the partner of a man the police were still not naming at that point, the fourth bomber whose image had been released. He had been filmed wearing a blue England top and carrying a black rucksack, and been seen running away from Shepherd's Bush Tube station moments after a bomb failed to go off there on 21 July.
This man was Osman Hussain, a 27-year-old Londoner born in Somalia. Or perhaps he was Isaac Hamdi, an Ethiopian. The same man has been known by both names, and his nationality is not yet clear. He had two children with Ms Girma, aged six and two. If he had been at the flat where she lived with her mother in Stockwell since the failed attack he was not there when the police called - because he had already left the country. Hussain had taken the Eurostar train from Waterloo the previous day, bound for Paris. But he was using a mobile telephone that belonged to his brother (or brother-in-law, according to some reports), the owner of an internet café close to Termini railway station in Rome, Italy. So as the days went by, investigators working with Italian phone companies were able to listen to conversations between Hussain and his brother and follow the electronic trail of the mobile from Paris to Milan and on to Rome. They listened and waited to pounce.
There were at least 6,000 police officers on the streets of London and in the Underground last Thursday morning, a week after the failed attacks and three weeks since the devastation of 7 July. Half of those officers were armed. The whole transport system was on high alert, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said it was very possible that "those at large will strike again" or that another terrorist cell might do so. He was confident they would be caught, but warned: "This is not the B team. These were not the amateurs. They only made one mistake [in failing to detonate their bombs] and we're very, very lucky." Nine people were arrested in two raids on addresses in Tooting on Thursday, but so far the only bomb suspect in custody was Yasin Hassan Omar. He had asked for a translator, and complained of feeling unwell from the after-effects of the Taser. His DNA and fingerprints had been taken, his clothing replaced. There had been halal food, a prayer mat and a Koran for him in the police station; he had been given the opportunity to rest, and to see a solicitor. But there were questions to be asked, by interviewers skilled in psychological techniques. He might even have been shown photographs of the bodies of those who died on 7 July. Did he want to talk?
The net began to close, quietly, on Friday morning. The Scotland Yard firearms unit SO19 met with members of an SAS squadron devoted to fighting terrorism. They were about to launch a joint operation that would make the SAS visible on the streets of London for the first time since the Iranian embassy siege in 1980, although this time it was only giving "technical advice". Detectives had been tipped off by a call from a member of the public that one of the men they wanted was in block K of the Peabody estate in Dalgarno Gardens, North Kensington. This was only a short walk from the Little Wormwood Scrubs recreation ground where a rucksack full of explosives had been found dumped the previous Saturday.
The flat had been watched overnight. Then, on Friday morning, one neighbour saw a man in what looked like a bus driver's blue uniform being brought to the flats. He pointed to the fourth floor of the block and was then led away, with his hands tied behind his back by white plastic. The police were also watching another address in Tavistock Crescent, Notting Hill, less than a mile away. A woman there had seen a van with blacked-out windows in the road outside for a few days.
By 10am there were police officers, some in plain clothes and others in uniform with body armour, carrying rifles and machine guns in the streets near the fashionable market at Portobello Road. They moved in slowly and calmly, and were hardly noticed by some. Kieran Batten, a 32-year-old civil engineer, was working in a hole in the street when armed police appeared. "The police shouted, 'Get out of the hole and get out of the area.'" But Mr Batten didn't. He showed remarkable calm in the face of this sudden alarming disturbance. "I carried on working, really because somebody's house could have been flooded if we had stopped."
The first raid was on Tavistock Crescent. Charlotte Brown, a 16-year-old student, saw police marksmen aiming their guns at the flat below hers. It was occupied by a couple she thought were from Somalia, and their two young children, who were "perfectly normal, very nice neighbours". The teenager was scared, and didn't dare look out of the window, but heard police shouting something about containers in the garden below. Police knocked on the door and told her to leave as soon as possible, and also evacuated more than 100 people from other homes nearby.
"Suddenly, we heard five or six bangs," said Davina Johnson, one of the neighbours. "We were all very frightened and we didn't know what to do."
The sound was the front door of the flat being blown off and CS gas canisters fired inside. A man in a white T-shirt staggered out and was wrestled to the ground by police, who handcuffed him. They arrested 22-year-old Wahbi Mohammed, not one of the suspects whose images had been shown, but a brother of one, and the man believed to have dumped the rucksack at the recreation ground.
At the same time, a column of 12 police cars and vans was driving slowly towards Dalgarno Gardens. From the vehicles emerged heavily armed police officers in body armour, some wearing gas masks, others carrying shields. They moved slowly to the front and rear of the 1930s block, and some began to climb the stairs.
On the third floor, Brian Dempster was at home playing with his children, Callum, five, and Tehya, four, when there was a noise outside. Mr Dempster, 36, said he opened his door to see what was going on but armed police yelled at him to get back inside. "All hell seemed to be breaking loose," he said. "The children were crying and shaking."
Television audiences saw the scene from a different perspective, as a neighbour with a video camera captured extraordinary scenes. They showed a boy coming out on to the balcony just as a policeman in body armour and a helmet, carrying a gun and with a dog on a lead, was hammering on the door of the next flat. The boy appeared to try to stroke the dog, but the policeman urged him to get back and appeared uncertain what to do with the child. Then a young girl appeared. Their father looked out to see what was going on, but disappeared again, leaving the children with the policeman. They and their father were shooed away to safety. The streets down below had been sealed off and locals were streaming away from the scene, some running at gunpoint as armed officers urged them to hurry. Many were worried about being victims of a chemical attack.
Cars burst through the cordons, then spilled men in blue overalls, wearing balaclavas and carrying machine guns. A helicopter hovered overhead as officers crouched on the balcony 20 feet from the flat where they believed the failed bombers to be hiding. Their laser sights were trained on the door.
"Come out, this is the police," they shouted, but whoever was inside was reluctant to emerge. An officer called out to one of the men by name. "Muhammed, come out with your hands up." But nobody came. The police could not know if the flat was booby- trapped. One officer could be heard reassuring the men inside that they would not get hurt, but a few moments later another warning by loud hailer that the police would have to come in by force. They could be heard yelling instruction to the suspects to strip to their underwear, walk out of the flat, turn into the corridor and then stop. But still they did not come. This was a siege.
"Why won't you come out?" a neighbour heard a policeman ask.
"I'm scared," said a voice from within the flat. "How do I know you won't shoot me?"
The reply, according to witnesses, was: "That was a mistake." This was taken to be a reference to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by police at Stockwell station on 22 July.
At 12.08pm there was an explosion. Two police officers had crept up to the front door of the flat, crouching as they went, and attached explosives to it.
"There was a bomb that went off," said Lisa Davis, who was in a neighbouring flat but on the telephone to Sky News giving a running commentary. "'Take your clothes off' is what they are telling him right now. They are asking him does he understand. They keep asking him, 'Is there a reason that you shouldn't leave the flat?'"
The voice of a man calling out Muhammad repeatedly could be heard as Ms Davis spoke, along with the words, "You must do what we say." At 12.20pm the voice shouted a warning and CS gas canisters were fired into the flat.
Across the courtyard in block P, Alan Simpson could see what happened next. "There were more shots, low thuds, and then the two men came out on the balcony. They had shaven heads. They were both burly but they had snot pouring out of their noses. Their eyes were streaming."
The men had dropped their trousers and put their hands in the air. They were naked apart from their underpants.
One of them was Muktar Said Ibrahim. The other was Ramzi Muhammed, caught on CCTV running away from Oval Tube station after his rucksack bomb apparently failed to go off. They had both expected death on 21 July. Instead they were standing in their underwear at gunpoint, overcome with the humiliating effects of gas, naked and defenceless, and watched by television viewers all over the country.
The pair walked slowly along the balcony to police, who gave them white paper suits to wear. Eventually they were led away clad in these overalls and in gloves, their faces hidden from the cameras by boards held up by police officers, who themselves were wearing hoods in order to disguise their identities. Explosives experts and forensic officers entered the building an hour after the arrests.
The final drama of Friday afternoon happened several thousand miles away in Rome. There the brother of Osman Hussain had been approached by the Italian security forces and had handed over the keys to the flat where the suspect was hiding, according to an officer involved in the arrest. "Osman was there, immediately in the first room on the right," the anonymous officer said. "He did not put up any resistance. He obeyed all our orders."
Hussain was apparently holding the telephone by which he had been traced, when 40 Italian Central Security Operations officers arrived at the two-bedroomed flat in the Tor Pignattara area of southern Rome. He was brought out of the flat with a black hood over his head. Computers and software were taken away, as they were from the internet café at Termini station, but no explosives were found.
Hussain is expected to be extradited from Italy. He was the last of the five suspects to be arrested. The operation cost more than £4.5m. It involved the police following up 5,000 tip-offs from members of the public, taking 1,800 witness statements and examining 15,000 CCTV tapes. There were at least 29 arrests, in southern England and the Midlands. And yet the search is still not over.
The four failed bombers, and those who died on 7 July, could not have been acting alone. They must have been advised, encouraged, inspired by others who knew about explosives, who could plan the attacks, and had the words and ideas to capture the hearts and souls of young British men.
"It would be a mistake to think we are at the end of this," said a Scotland Yard source on Friday night, despite the remarkable successes of the day. "We might just be at the beginning."
Osman Hussain, 27
Shepherd's Bush Tube bomb
Known to his friends as Andrew, Hussein is originally from Somalia, but is now a naturalised UK citizen. He was seen on CCTV footage running from Shepherd's Bush Tube station wearing a blue England football top, which he later discarded. He fled down the Hammersmith & City line then ran through gardens and a house before boarding a bus towards Wandsworth. He was arrested in Rome on Friday after police traced his mobile phone calls, and will be extradited to Britain. His wife was arrested at a Stockwell flat, and a woman friend was arrested in Tooting.
Ramzi Mohammed, age unknown
Oval Tube bomb
Caught on CCTV after his bomb failed to go off between Oval and Stockwell stations, wearing a New York sweatshirt. Members of the public tried to apprehend him after smoke came from his rucksack, but he escaped and ran through the streets towards Brixton. He is believed to be of East African origin. Neighbours say he drives a No 7 bus, which is based at Westbourne Park station in west London and runs from East Acton to Russell Square. He was detained with Muktar Said Ibrahim on Friday in a flat in North Kensington after a one-hour siege.
Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27
No 26 Hackney bus bomb
Ibrahim arrived in the UK from Eritrea in 1992, aged 14, and was given a British passport last September. He is known to have attended the controversial Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, in which the radical cleric Abu Hamza preached. He is also believed to have befriended the "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid. He shared a flat with the Warren Street bomber Yasin Hassan Omar and joined in Sunday football matches with Omar against teams of boys from their estate. In 1996, he was sentenced to five years in jail for a violent mugging.
Yasin Hassan Omar, 24
Warren Street Tube bomb
The first of the 21 July bombers to be caught, Omar was arrested in Birmingham last Wednesday after police shot him with a Taser stun gun. Originally from Somalia, he arrived in Britain in 1992, aged 11, with his sister. He was put into the care of foster parents. He played football with neighbours in between prayers at the Finsbury Park Mosque and shared a flat with Muktar Said Ibrahim. After his arrest, a local Muslim shopkeeper said Omar had berated him for selling alcohol, and claimed: "Two days after September 11 he was coming into my shop and praising Bin Laden."
They came out choking on CS gas, their eyes streaming and their hands in the air. The men who had terrorised London were naked and terrified now, as police in body armour and intimidating gas masks trained the laser sights of their machine guns on them. And as the biggest manhunt in British police history reached its strange, apocalyptic climax live on television, satellites were tracking the last suspect to his hiding place on the other side of Europe.
But the arrest of all five bomb suspects was not down to hi-tech surveillance gizmos or futuristic weaponry, according to the head of the Metropolitan Police. It was about "good old-fashioned detective work".
And that is, indeed, the hidden story of an extraordinary week: how detectives working on tip-offs from the public, combing through the records and interviewing people in the street, just as they do on The Bill, tracked down the alleged terrorists. And when they found them, these men did not have the air of satanic glamour lent to them by those fuzzy, chilling CCTV grabs. They were ordinary looking, and they were captured in ordinary places, still living among us.
The first breakthrough came on 22 July, the day after four unexploded bombs were left in rucksacks at Warren Street, Shepherd's Bush and Oval stations and on a No 26 bus. The parents of Muktar Said Ibrahim looked at the CCTV images of the four suspects and realised that one of them, the alleged bus bomber, was their son. He lived apart from them, and had done for a while. They called the police.
The 27-year-old British Eritrean shared a flat in New Southgate, north London, with another suspect: Yasin Hassan Omar, 24, a Somalian British citizen who is suspected of trying to blow up a train at Warren Street. On the same day that Ibrahim's parents rang the police, a neighbour saw him back near the flat with Omar, acting suspiciously.
The one-bedroom, ninth-floor flat in Curtis House was let in the name of Omar, whose rent was paid by Enfield council. Last Monday the police raided the flat and arrested two men, but neither of them was a bomber. On Tuesday they searched a lock-up nearby, and found chemicals which could have been used to make bombs.
The next breakthrough came in the early hours of Wednesday morning when police raided two addresses in Birmingham and found Omar there. Rather than take the chance of shooting an innocent man dead, as they had a few days earlier, they immobilised him with a Taser stun gun capable of generating 50,000 volts of electricity. The muscles of its victim seize up in excruciating pain, but he can recover within 20 minutes. Omar was taken to Paddington Green high-security police station in London for questioning.
The previous Friday a man had been arrested in Stockwell, south London. Now, late on Wednesday, police returned there to arrest three women at a flat in Blair House. They were held on suspicion of harbouring offenders and taken away, along with three small children. One of the women arrested was Yeshiemebet Girma, the partner of a man the police were still not naming at that point, the fourth bomber whose image had been released. He had been filmed wearing a blue England top and carrying a black rucksack, and been seen running away from Shepherd's Bush Tube station moments after a bomb failed to go off there on 21 July.
This man was Osman Hussain, a 27-year-old Londoner born in Somalia. Or perhaps he was Isaac Hamdi, an Ethiopian. The same man has been known by both names, and his nationality is not yet clear. He had two children with Ms Girma, aged six and two. If he had been at the flat where she lived with her mother in Stockwell since the failed attack he was not there when the police called - because he had already left the country. Hussain had taken the Eurostar train from Waterloo the previous day, bound for Paris. But he was using a mobile telephone that belonged to his brother (or brother-in-law, according to some reports), the owner of an internet café close to Termini railway station in Rome, Italy. So as the days went by, investigators working with Italian phone companies were able to listen to conversations between Hussain and his brother and follow the electronic trail of the mobile from Paris to Milan and on to Rome. They listened and waited to pounce.
There were at least 6,000 police officers on the streets of London and in the Underground last Thursday morning, a week after the failed attacks and three weeks since the devastation of 7 July. Half of those officers were armed. The whole transport system was on high alert, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said it was very possible that "those at large will strike again" or that another terrorist cell might do so. He was confident they would be caught, but warned: "This is not the B team. These were not the amateurs. They only made one mistake [in failing to detonate their bombs] and we're very, very lucky." Nine people were arrested in two raids on addresses in Tooting on Thursday, but so far the only bomb suspect in custody was Yasin Hassan Omar. He had asked for a translator, and complained of feeling unwell from the after-effects of the Taser. His DNA and fingerprints had been taken, his clothing replaced. There had been halal food, a prayer mat and a Koran for him in the police station; he had been given the opportunity to rest, and to see a solicitor. But there were questions to be asked, by interviewers skilled in psychological techniques. He might even have been shown photographs of the bodies of those who died on 7 July. Did he want to talk?
The net began to close, quietly, on Friday morning. The Scotland Yard firearms unit SO19 met with members of an SAS squadron devoted to fighting terrorism. They were about to launch a joint operation that would make the SAS visible on the streets of London for the first time since the Iranian embassy siege in 1980, although this time it was only giving "technical advice". Detectives had been tipped off by a call from a member of the public that one of the men they wanted was in block K of the Peabody estate in Dalgarno Gardens, North Kensington. This was only a short walk from the Little Wormwood Scrubs recreation ground where a rucksack full of explosives had been found dumped the previous Saturday.
The flat had been watched overnight. Then, on Friday morning, one neighbour saw a man in what looked like a bus driver's blue uniform being brought to the flats. He pointed to the fourth floor of the block and was then led away, with his hands tied behind his back by white plastic. The police were also watching another address in Tavistock Crescent, Notting Hill, less than a mile away. A woman there had seen a van with blacked-out windows in the road outside for a few days.
By 10am there were police officers, some in plain clothes and others in uniform with body armour, carrying rifles and machine guns in the streets near the fashionable market at Portobello Road. They moved in slowly and calmly, and were hardly noticed by some. Kieran Batten, a 32-year-old civil engineer, was working in a hole in the street when armed police appeared. "The police shouted, 'Get out of the hole and get out of the area.'" But Mr Batten didn't. He showed remarkable calm in the face of this sudden alarming disturbance. "I carried on working, really because somebody's house could have been flooded if we had stopped."
The first raid was on Tavistock Crescent. Charlotte Brown, a 16-year-old student, saw police marksmen aiming their guns at the flat below hers. It was occupied by a couple she thought were from Somalia, and their two young children, who were "perfectly normal, very nice neighbours". The teenager was scared, and didn't dare look out of the window, but heard police shouting something about containers in the garden below. Police knocked on the door and told her to leave as soon as possible, and also evacuated more than 100 people from other homes nearby.
"Suddenly, we heard five or six bangs," said Davina Johnson, one of the neighbours. "We were all very frightened and we didn't know what to do."
The sound was the front door of the flat being blown off and CS gas canisters fired inside. A man in a white T-shirt staggered out and was wrestled to the ground by police, who handcuffed him. They arrested 22-year-old Wahbi Mohammed, not one of the suspects whose images had been shown, but a brother of one, and the man believed to have dumped the rucksack at the recreation ground.
At the same time, a column of 12 police cars and vans was driving slowly towards Dalgarno Gardens. From the vehicles emerged heavily armed police officers in body armour, some wearing gas masks, others carrying shields. They moved slowly to the front and rear of the 1930s block, and some began to climb the stairs.
On the third floor, Brian Dempster was at home playing with his children, Callum, five, and Tehya, four, when there was a noise outside. Mr Dempster, 36, said he opened his door to see what was going on but armed police yelled at him to get back inside. "All hell seemed to be breaking loose," he said. "The children were crying and shaking."
Television audiences saw the scene from a different perspective, as a neighbour with a video camera captured extraordinary scenes. They showed a boy coming out on to the balcony just as a policeman in body armour and a helmet, carrying a gun and with a dog on a lead, was hammering on the door of the next flat. The boy appeared to try to stroke the dog, but the policeman urged him to get back and appeared uncertain what to do with the child. Then a young girl appeared. Their father looked out to see what was going on, but disappeared again, leaving the children with the policeman. They and their father were shooed away to safety. The streets down below had been sealed off and locals were streaming away from the scene, some running at gunpoint as armed officers urged them to hurry. Many were worried about being victims of a chemical attack.
Cars burst through the cordons, then spilled men in blue overalls, wearing balaclavas and carrying machine guns. A helicopter hovered overhead as officers crouched on the balcony 20 feet from the flat where they believed the failed bombers to be hiding. Their laser sights were trained on the door.
"Come out, this is the police," they shouted, but whoever was inside was reluctant to emerge. An officer called out to one of the men by name. "Muhammed, come out with your hands up." But nobody came. The police could not know if the flat was booby- trapped. One officer could be heard reassuring the men inside that they would not get hurt, but a few moments later another warning by loud hailer that the police would have to come in by force. They could be heard yelling instruction to the suspects to strip to their underwear, walk out of the flat, turn into the corridor and then stop. But still they did not come. This was a siege.
"Why won't you come out?" a neighbour heard a policeman ask.
"I'm scared," said a voice from within the flat. "How do I know you won't shoot me?"
The reply, according to witnesses, was: "That was a mistake." This was taken to be a reference to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by police at Stockwell station on 22 July.
At 12.08pm there was an explosion. Two police officers had crept up to the front door of the flat, crouching as they went, and attached explosives to it.
"There was a bomb that went off," said Lisa Davis, who was in a neighbouring flat but on the telephone to Sky News giving a running commentary. "'Take your clothes off' is what they are telling him right now. They are asking him does he understand. They keep asking him, 'Is there a reason that you shouldn't leave the flat?'"
The voice of a man calling out Muhammad repeatedly could be heard as Ms Davis spoke, along with the words, "You must do what we say." At 12.20pm the voice shouted a warning and CS gas canisters were fired into the flat.
Across the courtyard in block P, Alan Simpson could see what happened next. "There were more shots, low thuds, and then the two men came out on the balcony. They had shaven heads. They were both burly but they had snot pouring out of their noses. Their eyes were streaming."
The men had dropped their trousers and put their hands in the air. They were naked apart from their underpants.
One of them was Muktar Said Ibrahim. The other was Ramzi Muhammed, caught on CCTV running away from Oval Tube station after his rucksack bomb apparently failed to go off. They had both expected death on 21 July. Instead they were standing in their underwear at gunpoint, overcome with the humiliating effects of gas, naked and defenceless, and watched by television viewers all over the country.
The pair walked slowly along the balcony to police, who gave them white paper suits to wear. Eventually they were led away clad in these overalls and in gloves, their faces hidden from the cameras by boards held up by police officers, who themselves were wearing hoods in order to disguise their identities. Explosives experts and forensic officers entered the building an hour after the arrests.
The final drama of Friday afternoon happened several thousand miles away in Rome. There the brother of Osman Hussain had been approached by the Italian security forces and had handed over the keys to the flat where the suspect was hiding, according to an officer involved in the arrest. "Osman was there, immediately in the first room on the right," the anonymous officer said. "He did not put up any resistance. He obeyed all our orders."
Hussain was apparently holding the telephone by which he had been traced, when 40 Italian Central Security Operations officers arrived at the two-bedroomed flat in the Tor Pignattara area of southern Rome. He was brought out of the flat with a black hood over his head. Computers and software were taken away, as they were from the internet café at Termini station, but no explosives were found.
Hussain is expected to be extradited from Italy. He was the last of the five suspects to be arrested. The operation cost more than £4.5m. It involved the police following up 5,000 tip-offs from members of the public, taking 1,800 witness statements and examining 15,000 CCTV tapes. There were at least 29 arrests, in southern England and the Midlands. And yet the search is still not over.
The four failed bombers, and those who died on 7 July, could not have been acting alone. They must have been advised, encouraged, inspired by others who knew about explosives, who could plan the attacks, and had the words and ideas to capture the hearts and souls of young British men.
"It would be a mistake to think we are at the end of this," said a Scotland Yard source on Friday night, despite the remarkable successes of the day. "We might just be at the beginning."
Osman Hussain, 27
Shepherd's Bush Tube bomb
Known to his friends as Andrew, Hussein is originally from Somalia, but is now a naturalised UK citizen. He was seen on CCTV footage running from Shepherd's Bush Tube station wearing a blue England football top, which he later discarded. He fled down the Hammersmith & City line then ran through gardens and a house before boarding a bus towards Wandsworth. He was arrested in Rome on Friday after police traced his mobile phone calls, and will be extradited to Britain. His wife was arrested at a Stockwell flat, and a woman friend was arrested in Tooting.
Ramzi Mohammed, age unknown
Oval Tube bomb
Caught on CCTV after his bomb failed to go off between Oval and Stockwell stations, wearing a New York sweatshirt. Members of the public tried to apprehend him after smoke came from his rucksack, but he escaped and ran through the streets towards Brixton. He is believed to be of East African origin. Neighbours say he drives a No 7 bus, which is based at Westbourne Park station in west London and runs from East Acton to Russell Square. He was detained with Muktar Said Ibrahim on Friday in a flat in North Kensington after a one-hour siege.
Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27
No 26 Hackney bus bomb
Ibrahim arrived in the UK from Eritrea in 1992, aged 14, and was given a British passport last September. He is known to have attended the controversial Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, in which the radical cleric Abu Hamza preached. He is also believed to have befriended the "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid. He shared a flat with the Warren Street bomber Yasin Hassan Omar and joined in Sunday football matches with Omar against teams of boys from their estate. In 1996, he was sentenced to five years in jail for a violent mugging.
Yasin Hassan Omar, 24
Warren Street Tube bomb
The first of the 21 July bombers to be caught, Omar was arrested in Birmingham last Wednesday after police shot him with a Taser stun gun. Originally from Somalia, he arrived in Britain in 1992, aged 11, with his sister. He was put into the care of foster parents. He played football with neighbours in between prayers at the Finsbury Park Mosque and shared a flat with Muktar Said Ibrahim. After his arrest, a local Muslim shopkeeper said Omar had berated him for selling alcohol, and claimed: "Two days after September 11 he was coming into my shop and praising Bin Laden."
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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article302749.ece
The attacks on London, Part Two: Why the search for the London bombers is still far from over
They may have caught the men who carried bombs on to the Underground, but detectives know they must now move fast to trace those whose brains, money and ideology made the attacks happen.
Special report by Raymond Whitaker, Francis Elliott, Sophie Goodchild and Paul Lashmar
Published: 31 July 2005
Nine suspected "foot soldiers" in the London bombings are either dead or in custody, but the hundreds of police, forensic scientists and intelligence operatives involved in the biggest terror investigation Britain has ever seen cannot afford to ease up for a moment.
Not only could more terror cells be waiting to strike, possibly taking their cue from the failed bombings 10 days ago, but the bombers and would-be bombers of 7 and 21 July must have had considerable support. They needed money, shelter, access to sophisticated detonators and - assuming they made their own explosives - some training in how to assemble the bombs.
Deep in the bare basement of London's Paddington Green police station, where all main terror suspects are taken, interrogators will be seeking the answer to one question above all: is there a mastermind at work? It may be the key to determining the size and shape of the network behind the bombers.
Investigators speak in terms of concentric circles, with the men of violence at the centre being surrounded by rings of sympathisers, bankers and bomb-makers. Penetrating this support structure is especially urgent because police are working in the belief that the groups responsible for the two rounds of attacks were self-sufficient, the second triggered two weeks to the day the first had taken place. With Thursday marking another fortnight since the last attempt, no one can be sure whether a third cell, seemingly unconnected with the others, is now preparing an attack.
Only by disrupting the leadership and support networks sustaining the would-be suicide bombers can any hope of an early return to normality be achieved. "Al-Qa'ida does not act like some classic Graham Greene cell," Sir Ian Blair said a week after the 7 July bombings. "It has very loose affiliations, and we have loose > affiliations, and we have got to find the bankers, the chemists and the trainers - all the people who are assisting in this."
But what do police really know about the men and women sustaining the plots? Within each cell there is likely to have been one ringleader. It seems clear, for example, that Mohammed Siddique Khan was the senior figure in the 7 July cell. At 30 he was several years older than the other suicide bombers.
The parents of the two younger Leeds-based Muslims in the cell said their son had come under the influence of a mysterious "Mr K": there is no evidence that this was anyone other than Khan. The former teaching assistant was also identified by Mohammed Junaid Babar, a convicted al-Qa'ida member in the US. Khan also knew one of the two British Muslims from Derby who staged a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
But who gave Khan his orders for the 7 July attack, and did he also instruct the leader of the 21 July cell?
Forensic evidence will be crucial in establishing any link between the two sets of bombers, even if they were not aware of each others' existence. Sources have indicated similarities in the type of explosive used and the rucksacks in which they were carried, but there has been no word on whether the bombs used the same batch of explosive. One of the main priorities will be to find pieces of the detonators used in the suicide bombings. If they are identical to those employed two weeks later, the connection would be conclusively proved.
In the meantime, speculation about a possible mastermind has fastened on a number of figures. Most attention has been devoted to Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British-born militant arrested in Zambia after he was incorrectly reported to have been held in Pakistan. He is now said to be telling his captors that he was once a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden.
If true, no Briton would ever have risen higher in the ranks of al-Qa'ida than Aswat. The name of the 30-year-old militant from Dewsbury emerged within days of the synchronised suicide bombings that killed 52 people. He was said to have slipped into Britain a fortnight before the attacks, and to have flown out hours before the four struck. According to rumours, he was in mobile phone contact with least one and possibly all four of the bombers, having made as many as 20 calls.
The only problem is that the rumours remain just that, and official sources are now doing their best to play down his potential role. "Any suggestion that he is linked with the bombings is wrong," said one Whitehall source. "The supposed mobile phone calls are a red herring, [although] that is not to say he is not of interest more generally."
Security sources believe Aswat is linked with terrorism, but outside Britain. He has been on the run since 1999, when he allegedly tried to set up training camps for al-Qa'ida in the US, and his arrest in Zambia was prompted by the FBI. According to British diplomatic sources, he is more likely to be extradited to the US than Britain.
Three of the four suicide bombers had close links to Pakistan, but the suspects in the failed bombings were all from east Africa, the other region in which al-Qa'ida has influence. America first became aware of the network's power when it attacked the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam with simultaneous bombings in August 1998. And even after 9/11 provoked a worldwide assault on the network, it struck again in November 2002. A hotel used by Israeli tourists in Mombasa was bombed; almost at the same moment a hand-held missile was fired at an airliner carrying holidaymakers home to Israel, but it missed.
As they seek to break into the concentric circles around the bombers, investigators have many more avenues to explore. Among them is disturbing evidence that Britain's prisons have become recruiting ground for radical Islamic groups. Several convicted and suspected British terrorists are alleged to have been radicalised while in custody, including Muktar Said-Ibrahim, arrested last week, who served two and a half years in young offenders' institutions. Richard Reid, jailed in the US for trying to bring down an airliner with explosives in his shoe, was drawn into radical Islam while in prison.
"When offenders first arrive in prison, they are told by the old hands to say they are practicing Muslims because the halal food is better," said one ex-convict. "Some cons are looking for meaning in their life and are drawn into or revert back to Islam. Unfortunately some inmates spout a pretty radical form of Islam." He added: "Prison is a ideal place for indoctrination as you have a captive audience, alienation and violence all mixed together." A leaked briefing paper to the Prime Minister warned: "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 disillusionment with their existence."
More than 6,000 prison inmates in Britain give Islam as their religion. There are 130 imams employed in the country's 138 prisons, a few of whom have been suspended after they were alleged to have made anti-Western comments. But it is usually other inmates rather than imams who seem to draw offenders into radical Islam. In May this year the independent anti-terrorism watchdog, Lord Carlile of Berriew, warned ministers of the influence of extremists at one prison.
Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced Tory former cabinet minister, says efforts were made to recruit him to Islam during his prison sentence. He saw the recruitment of men like Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber", as no exception: "Rather, it is the militant face of a much broader phenomenon: the Islamic mission that is a new and astonishing feature of British prison life."
Another target of the investigation is the bomb-makers or chemists. Even if there was no overall mastermind, there may have been a figure with some expert knowledge, probably stemming from a degree in chemistry or a related subject. Such a person could have slipped into Britain and out again for the specific purpose of assembling the bombs.
The explosives found by officers investigating the London bombings were home-made, with the ingredients readily available on the high street. But the construction of the devices would have been difficult and dangerous. Detonators are more difficult to obtain, and might have been bought abroad. Other criminals leave a fingerprint at the scene of their offence, but bomb-makers leave a "signature" through the types of devices they build. Israeli police have conducted extensive forensic examinations of every bombing in Israel so that they can gain a better understanding of the techniques used and the profile of the bomb-makers. In some cases, links have been made from bombs used to carry out atrocities in one country to bomb makers living in another.
Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed "the engineer", was a notorious bomb-maker for the Palestinian group Hamas who is understood to have killed and injured hundreds. He studied chemical engineering at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank in the mid-1980s. His role as a bomb-maker came to an ironic end in 1996, when he was blown up by a mobile phone given to him by a friend who later disappeared.
One trail followed by investigators into the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington - the financing of the operation - may prove less fruitful in the new era of al-Qa'ida. While the 9/11 plotters needed pilot training on Boeing 747s and large numbers of air tickets to conduct reconnaissance for their mission, today's attacks tend to use home-grown terrorists operating on their own turf.
But there remains the fact that criminal networks, such as drug cartels, make money from their crimes and terror gangs do not: some cash is needed to finance their bombing campaigns and training camps for recruits. Without money they cannot operate.
But while investigators examine the myriad web of connections among the London conspirators on the one hand and al-Qa'ida's top leadership on the other, they have yet to establish any direct link between the two groups. One set is hiding in Pakistani cities and along the country's border with Afghanistan; the others are on our streets and in our council estates. Finding the common denominator is the priority.
Additional reporting by Graham Moonie
Who is behind the bombers?
"We have go to find the bankers, the chemists and the trainers - all the people who are assisting in this" - Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, 14 July.
The Banker
His funds will have been vital in setting up the terror cells, provided for training at overseas extremist training camps. Likely to have channelled cash through an off-shore bank account or even through the guise of a legitimate charity. The sophisticated web of financial transactions will make it difficult for investigators to penetrate and to unmask him.
The Chemist
Although the bomb materials could have been obtained on the high street, the bomb-maker would have needed expert knowledge to carry out the dangerous task of putting the bombs together. May already have experience in helping set up bomb campaigns abroad and have been educated in legitimate engineering or related subjects.
The Trainer
It is striking that suspects in both the 7 and 21 July attacks were bonded by a common interest in sport. Members of both groups are alleged to have met in gyms, and physical activity is a useful cover for terrorist training. Camps on the Afghanistan and Pakistan border have, in the past, trained thousands of jihadists.
The Mastermind
There is huge scepticism among security officials that the suicide bombers had the experience or capability to plan and carry out their attacks alone. The suspect most often put forward is Haroon Rashid Aswat, a militant arrested in Zambia who is alleged to have called the 7 July bombers, however, MI5 sources strongly downplay his significance.
Nine suspected "foot soldiers" in the London bombings are either dead or in custody, but the hundreds of police, forensic scientists and intelligence operatives involved in the biggest terror investigation Britain has ever seen cannot afford to ease up for a moment.
Not only could more terror cells be waiting to strike, possibly taking their cue from the failed bombings 10 days ago, but the bombers and would-be bombers of 7 and 21 July must have had considerable support. They needed money, shelter, access to sophisticated detonators and - assuming they made their own explosives - some training in how to assemble the bombs.
Deep in the bare basement of London's Paddington Green police station, where all main terror suspects are taken, interrogators will be seeking the answer to one question above all: is there a mastermind at work? It may be the key to determining the size and shape of the network behind the bombers.
Investigators speak in terms of concentric circles, with the men of violence at the centre being surrounded by rings of sympathisers, bankers and bomb-makers. Penetrating this support structure is especially urgent because police are working in the belief that the groups responsible for the two rounds of attacks were self-sufficient, the second triggered two weeks to the day the first had taken place. With Thursday marking another fortnight since the last attempt, no one can be sure whether a third cell, seemingly unconnected with the others, is now preparing an attack.
Only by disrupting the leadership and support networks sustaining the would-be suicide bombers can any hope of an early return to normality be achieved. "Al-Qa'ida does not act like some classic Graham Greene cell," Sir Ian Blair said a week after the 7 July bombings. "It has very loose affiliations, and we have loose > affiliations, and we have got to find the bankers, the chemists and the trainers - all the people who are assisting in this."
But what do police really know about the men and women sustaining the plots? Within each cell there is likely to have been one ringleader. It seems clear, for example, that Mohammed Siddique Khan was the senior figure in the 7 July cell. At 30 he was several years older than the other suicide bombers.
The parents of the two younger Leeds-based Muslims in the cell said their son had come under the influence of a mysterious "Mr K": there is no evidence that this was anyone other than Khan. The former teaching assistant was also identified by Mohammed Junaid Babar, a convicted al-Qa'ida member in the US. Khan also knew one of the two British Muslims from Derby who staged a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
But who gave Khan his orders for the 7 July attack, and did he also instruct the leader of the 21 July cell?
Forensic evidence will be crucial in establishing any link between the two sets of bombers, even if they were not aware of each others' existence. Sources have indicated similarities in the type of explosive used and the rucksacks in which they were carried, but there has been no word on whether the bombs used the same batch of explosive. One of the main priorities will be to find pieces of the detonators used in the suicide bombings. If they are identical to those employed two weeks later, the connection would be conclusively proved.
In the meantime, speculation about a possible mastermind has fastened on a number of figures. Most attention has been devoted to Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British-born militant arrested in Zambia after he was incorrectly reported to have been held in Pakistan. He is now said to be telling his captors that he was once a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden.
If true, no Briton would ever have risen higher in the ranks of al-Qa'ida than Aswat. The name of the 30-year-old militant from Dewsbury emerged within days of the synchronised suicide bombings that killed 52 people. He was said to have slipped into Britain a fortnight before the attacks, and to have flown out hours before the four struck. According to rumours, he was in mobile phone contact with least one and possibly all four of the bombers, having made as many as 20 calls.
The only problem is that the rumours remain just that, and official sources are now doing their best to play down his potential role. "Any suggestion that he is linked with the bombings is wrong," said one Whitehall source. "The supposed mobile phone calls are a red herring, [although] that is not to say he is not of interest more generally."
Security sources believe Aswat is linked with terrorism, but outside Britain. He has been on the run since 1999, when he allegedly tried to set up training camps for al-Qa'ida in the US, and his arrest in Zambia was prompted by the FBI. According to British diplomatic sources, he is more likely to be extradited to the US than Britain.
Three of the four suicide bombers had close links to Pakistan, but the suspects in the failed bombings were all from east Africa, the other region in which al-Qa'ida has influence. America first became aware of the network's power when it attacked the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam with simultaneous bombings in August 1998. And even after 9/11 provoked a worldwide assault on the network, it struck again in November 2002. A hotel used by Israeli tourists in Mombasa was bombed; almost at the same moment a hand-held missile was fired at an airliner carrying holidaymakers home to Israel, but it missed.
As they seek to break into the concentric circles around the bombers, investigators have many more avenues to explore. Among them is disturbing evidence that Britain's prisons have become recruiting ground for radical Islamic groups. Several convicted and suspected British terrorists are alleged to have been radicalised while in custody, including Muktar Said-Ibrahim, arrested last week, who served two and a half years in young offenders' institutions. Richard Reid, jailed in the US for trying to bring down an airliner with explosives in his shoe, was drawn into radical Islam while in prison.
"When offenders first arrive in prison, they are told by the old hands to say they are practicing Muslims because the halal food is better," said one ex-convict. "Some cons are looking for meaning in their life and are drawn into or revert back to Islam. Unfortunately some inmates spout a pretty radical form of Islam." He added: "Prison is a ideal place for indoctrination as you have a captive audience, alienation and violence all mixed together." A leaked briefing paper to the Prime Minister warned: "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 disillusionment with their existence."
More than 6,000 prison inmates in Britain give Islam as their religion. There are 130 imams employed in the country's 138 prisons, a few of whom have been suspended after they were alleged to have made anti-Western comments. But it is usually other inmates rather than imams who seem to draw offenders into radical Islam. In May this year the independent anti-terrorism watchdog, Lord Carlile of Berriew, warned ministers of the influence of extremists at one prison.
Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced Tory former cabinet minister, says efforts were made to recruit him to Islam during his prison sentence. He saw the recruitment of men like Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber", as no exception: "Rather, it is the militant face of a much broader phenomenon: the Islamic mission that is a new and astonishing feature of British prison life."
Another target of the investigation is the bomb-makers or chemists. Even if there was no overall mastermind, there may have been a figure with some expert knowledge, probably stemming from a degree in chemistry or a related subject. Such a person could have slipped into Britain and out again for the specific purpose of assembling the bombs.
The explosives found by officers investigating the London bombings were home-made, with the ingredients readily available on the high street. But the construction of the devices would have been difficult and dangerous. Detonators are more difficult to obtain, and might have been bought abroad. Other criminals leave a fingerprint at the scene of their offence, but bomb-makers leave a "signature" through the types of devices they build. Israeli police have conducted extensive forensic examinations of every bombing in Israel so that they can gain a better understanding of the techniques used and the profile of the bomb-makers. In some cases, links have been made from bombs used to carry out atrocities in one country to bomb makers living in another.
Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed "the engineer", was a notorious bomb-maker for the Palestinian group Hamas who is understood to have killed and injured hundreds. He studied chemical engineering at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank in the mid-1980s. His role as a bomb-maker came to an ironic end in 1996, when he was blown up by a mobile phone given to him by a friend who later disappeared.
One trail followed by investigators into the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington - the financing of the operation - may prove less fruitful in the new era of al-Qa'ida. While the 9/11 plotters needed pilot training on Boeing 747s and large numbers of air tickets to conduct reconnaissance for their mission, today's attacks tend to use home-grown terrorists operating on their own turf.
But there remains the fact that criminal networks, such as drug cartels, make money from their crimes and terror gangs do not: some cash is needed to finance their bombing campaigns and training camps for recruits. Without money they cannot operate.
But while investigators examine the myriad web of connections among the London conspirators on the one hand and al-Qa'ida's top leadership on the other, they have yet to establish any direct link between the two groups. One set is hiding in Pakistani cities and along the country's border with Afghanistan; the others are on our streets and in our council estates. Finding the common denominator is the priority.
Additional reporting by Graham Moonie
Who is behind the bombers?
"We have go to find the bankers, the chemists and the trainers - all the people who are assisting in this" - Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, 14 July.
The Banker
His funds will have been vital in setting up the terror cells, provided for training at overseas extremist training camps. Likely to have channelled cash through an off-shore bank account or even through the guise of a legitimate charity. The sophisticated web of financial transactions will make it difficult for investigators to penetrate and to unmask him.
The Chemist
Although the bomb materials could have been obtained on the high street, the bomb-maker would have needed expert knowledge to carry out the dangerous task of putting the bombs together. May already have experience in helping set up bomb campaigns abroad and have been educated in legitimate engineering or related subjects.
The Trainer
It is striking that suspects in both the 7 and 21 July attacks were bonded by a common interest in sport. Members of both groups are alleged to have met in gyms, and physical activity is a useful cover for terrorist training. Camps on the Afghanistan and Pakistan border have, in the past, trained thousands of jihadists.
The Mastermind
There is huge scepticism among security officials that the suicide bombers had the experience or capability to plan and carry out their attacks alone. The suspect most often put forward is Haroon Rashid Aswat, a militant arrested in Zambia who is alleged to have called the 7 July bombers, however, MI5 sources strongly downplay his significance.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article302702.ece
The attacks on London, Part Three: Conflict within Islam
FEAR ON THE STREETS 'Bombings have definitely divided the community'
Published: 31 July 2005
Halfway through his speech to more than 2,000 men, women and children, the tears start streaming down Dr Hany El Banna's face. The founder of Islamic Relief has spent almost an hour arming his audience with examples from the Koran of how Islam is about integration, inclusiveness and human rights, and he has warned his audience of the dangers of those who say that Islam doesn't allow integration with non-believers or "kafir".
"This is what is said by a storyteller, not by a scholar. Those storytellers should not have a place. They are dividing society," he says. When he finishes, he is exhausted.
The families listening to Dr El Banna have gathered for a three-day event called Living Islam run by the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB). Set in the middle of rural Lincolnshire, far away from any of the large Muslim communities of Birmingham, London or Bradford, in some ways it feels a little detached. But alongside the kids' bouncy castles, archery and horse-riding are the talks on identity and workshops on theological issues. Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Swiss Islamic philosopher, is attending.
Malik - he doesn't give me his second name - tells me that this event "is the real face of Islam". The 36-year-old father of two from Glasgow tells me: "The Muslim community can be spiritually strong but tolerant towards everybody. It can work for justice, peace and for the community's betterment. But it should work not just for Muslims but for the whole of humanity."
Lurking in the ISB's youth wing, however, is an entirely different message. On a website for Young Muslims, or YM, are articles on jihad and calls for the boycotting of the kafir.
Also listed on their website, which caters for 11- to 18-year-olds, is an article entitled "Imam Hassan Al Banna on Jihad". It is the third article from the top.
"Jihad, beloved brother, is a powerful, invigorating yearning for Islam's might and glory, an intense, overwhelming desire for Islam's golden days, its strength and its pride, which makes you cry when looking at the weakness of Muslims today and the humiliating tragedies crushing them to death painfully everywhere," it reads. "Jihad, beloved brother, is: to turn your back on those who turn their back on their Faith, and to boycott those who openly wage war against Allah and His Messenger, so you should not have any dealings, or socialising or relationships of any kind.
"Jihad, beloved brother, is: to be a soldier for Allah, devoting your very soul and everything you own to Him; and when the might of Islam is under threat, its pride is blemished, and the bugle calls for Muslims to rise and restore to Islam its power and glory, you should be the first to answer the call, the first to join the ranks for Jihad (fighting): 'Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their wealth; for theirs (in return) is the Garden (of Paradise).'"
Further to this are anti-integration articles on atheism and secularism, and listed under the current affairs section are just two articles: "Zionism: a Black Historical Record" and "Israel Simply Has No Right to Exist".
Clearly there is a contradiction between having the same organisation delivering two very different visions of Islam. So what is going on? Nadeem Malik, one of the vice presidents of ISB, explains that he hasn't seen the material on the website himself but ISB doesn't shirk from responsibility. "Young Muslims is the youth wing. Anything that is there is within the remit of ISB. I'm not going to pretend otherwise and I'm not going to justify anything that's on there," he says. "But if it is on there it's a very small part of a much bigger structure that is very much against those views." But he says within ISB that view has come about only after a long debate.
Young Muslims and ISB were merged in 1994 but since then there has been a series of long and lengthy debates that has created this contradiction in views within the organisation. In many ways it is indicative of what is happening within Britain's Muslim organisations and communities across the country.
At the heart of these debates is how British Muslims interpret the Koran. The most problematic sticking point is whether the Koran is seen as a literal document or whether there is room to see the Koran as part of a historical context.
These differences have created tensions between Muslim groups who believe in an integrationist agenda and that more vocal minority who are fundamentally opposed to Muslims living within a non-Muslim structure of law, justice and education.
For an example, take the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Though its membership is in large part made up of the professional classes - managers, academics, doctors and the like - it interprets the teachings of the Koran in a literal fashion. So while Hizb ut-Tahrir does not disagree with the process of voting, casting your vote when it is part of a political system which is dominated by non-believers or kafir is seen as religiously outlawed, or haram.
Following from this, during the recent general election, Hizb ut-Tahrir told Muslims across the country not to vote, as it was forbidden by God. This may seem crazy, but the group is thought to have a membership of 2,000 to 3,000 people. And their invocation of Islam to justify a policy of anti-integration is a powerful message, especially when left unchallenged.
Zeyno Baran, director of international security and energy programs at the Nixon Center, a US think tank, says that that the West hasn't taken these non-violent radical groups seriously enough. "The West can no longer ignore the deadly impact of Hizb ut-Tahrir ideology, which provides very simple answers to complex problems and reaches millions of Muslims through cyberspace, the distribution of leaflets, and secret teaching centres," explains Ms Baran.
"Europe will only survive as Europe if it can assimilate Muslims, but what Hizb ut-Tahrir is teaching is not assimilation and it could be really dangerous for the future of Europe."
She see Hizb ut-Tahrir as part of a "conveyor belt of terrorism" and should not be left out of the security debate. "It is time to name the war correctly: this is a war of ideologies, and terrorist acts are the tip of the iceberg."
Ariel Cohen from the Heritage Foundation agrees that the focus shouldn't just be on violent Islamist groups. He says that violence is just a strategy. What is important is that jihadist groups and non-violent Islamist groups share the same ideas. "[These ideas] are inimical to democracy and human rights and women's rights and that is the lie of Hizb ut-Tahrir," he says. "Its goals are totalitarian and the debate about violence comes at the exclusion of other things. Hizb ut-Tahrir is indoctrinating tens of thousands of Muslims, enabling the creation of an environment for armed struggle." Mr Cohen says an example of this is how Al-Muhajiroun, a violent Islamist group based in the UK, uses the same ideological literature as Hizb ut-Tahrir, a non-violent one. It becomes easier for members to switch from a non-violent group to a violent group without having to change their fundamental beliefs.
So if these groups are so dangerous and divisive to Muslim communities and society at large, why haven't more mainstream Muslim groups acted against them decisively? Naseem Malik tells me that whereas before mainstream organisations wouldn't have criticised these groups directly, things are rapidly changing. "Within ISB there was that idea that you just say what you believe and don't necessarily go around condemning others."
He explains that this partly fits in with being English, where people don't necessarily make too much of a fuss, but he also says that shying away from direct criticism derives from a tradition in Islam.
"Within Islam there is a reluctance to publicly condemn people. Historically we have an imbalance of [lack of criticism], where on the one hand you've got to speak out for what's right but on the other hand you don't want to offend people," he says.
Naseem Malik believes that 7 July was a definite wake-up call and the decision to criticise directly was made only a few days before. "I think some people felt uncomfortable even after 9/11 but after 7 July we unanimously thought we've got to do this now. We have to fight back and come out for justice even if that means naming and shaming organisational groups."
At the same time, people within ISB tell me that they don't really understand how to get their voice heard. Their part-time media officer seemed to be surprised that a newspaper might be interested in what they had to say.
Stalin once said: "Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, so why should we allow them to have ideas?" If we are to tackle what has been happening, we have to acknowledge that ideas can be as dangerous as any bomb.
Mohammed Riaz, of the Leeds Islamic Centre:
These bombers were young and angry about certain things in Afghanistan and Iraq. But they are also out of control and there is nothing any of us can do to keep them in check because they do not listen to us. The police have to give us more support and help us find a way to bring hot-headed youths under control.
Natalie Rushton, 24, from Small Heath, Birmingham, has a five-month-old daughter, Dais:
The world seems to have gone mad in the last few weeks and I don't like the fact that anybody carrying large bags is somebody I look at with suspicion. It has affected race relations but it shouldn't. You can blame a whole section of society for the actions of a few.
Nick Perren, 43, of Southgate:
The bombings have divided the community. People are wary of foreigners, not just Muslims. I notice the divisions among the young, with the different groups all hanging around with those of the same nationality. I can't see the terrorists are going to achieve anything by it. Religion is supposed to be peaceful.
Aziz Hussein, 34, runs a fish and chip shop in Tooting:
I am a Muslim but I'm British as well and I do not like to be stigmatised. London has a diverse mix of people and faiths and it should stay that way, but people who don't have a right to be here shouldn't be. We should know who we let in and who we give money to.
Halfway through his speech to more than 2,000 men, women and children, the tears start streaming down Dr Hany El Banna's face. The founder of Islamic Relief has spent almost an hour arming his audience with examples from the Koran of how Islam is about integration, inclusiveness and human rights, and he has warned his audience of the dangers of those who say that Islam doesn't allow integration with non-believers or "kafir".
"This is what is said by a storyteller, not by a scholar. Those storytellers should not have a place. They are dividing society," he says. When he finishes, he is exhausted.
The families listening to Dr El Banna have gathered for a three-day event called Living Islam run by the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB). Set in the middle of rural Lincolnshire, far away from any of the large Muslim communities of Birmingham, London or Bradford, in some ways it feels a little detached. But alongside the kids' bouncy castles, archery and horse-riding are the talks on identity and workshops on theological issues. Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Swiss Islamic philosopher, is attending.
Malik - he doesn't give me his second name - tells me that this event "is the real face of Islam". The 36-year-old father of two from Glasgow tells me: "The Muslim community can be spiritually strong but tolerant towards everybody. It can work for justice, peace and for the community's betterment. But it should work not just for Muslims but for the whole of humanity."
Lurking in the ISB's youth wing, however, is an entirely different message. On a website for Young Muslims, or YM, are articles on jihad and calls for the boycotting of the kafir.
Also listed on their website, which caters for 11- to 18-year-olds, is an article entitled "Imam Hassan Al Banna on Jihad". It is the third article from the top.
"Jihad, beloved brother, is a powerful, invigorating yearning for Islam's might and glory, an intense, overwhelming desire for Islam's golden days, its strength and its pride, which makes you cry when looking at the weakness of Muslims today and the humiliating tragedies crushing them to death painfully everywhere," it reads. "Jihad, beloved brother, is: to turn your back on those who turn their back on their Faith, and to boycott those who openly wage war against Allah and His Messenger, so you should not have any dealings, or socialising or relationships of any kind.
"Jihad, beloved brother, is: to be a soldier for Allah, devoting your very soul and everything you own to Him; and when the might of Islam is under threat, its pride is blemished, and the bugle calls for Muslims to rise and restore to Islam its power and glory, you should be the first to answer the call, the first to join the ranks for Jihad (fighting): 'Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their wealth; for theirs (in return) is the Garden (of Paradise).'"
Further to this are anti-integration articles on atheism and secularism, and listed under the current affairs section are just two articles: "Zionism: a Black Historical Record" and "Israel Simply Has No Right to Exist".
Clearly there is a contradiction between having the same organisation delivering two very different visions of Islam. So what is going on? Nadeem Malik, one of the vice presidents of ISB, explains that he hasn't seen the material on the website himself but ISB doesn't shirk from responsibility. "Young Muslims is the youth wing. Anything that is there is within the remit of ISB. I'm not going to pretend otherwise and I'm not going to justify anything that's on there," he says. "But if it is on there it's a very small part of a much bigger structure that is very much against those views." But he says within ISB that view has come about only after a long debate.
Young Muslims and ISB were merged in 1994 but since then there has been a series of long and lengthy debates that has created this contradiction in views within the organisation. In many ways it is indicative of what is happening within Britain's Muslim organisations and communities across the country.
At the heart of these debates is how British Muslims interpret the Koran. The most problematic sticking point is whether the Koran is seen as a literal document or whether there is room to see the Koran as part of a historical context.
These differences have created tensions between Muslim groups who believe in an integrationist agenda and that more vocal minority who are fundamentally opposed to Muslims living within a non-Muslim structure of law, justice and education.
For an example, take the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Though its membership is in large part made up of the professional classes - managers, academics, doctors and the like - it interprets the teachings of the Koran in a literal fashion. So while Hizb ut-Tahrir does not disagree with the process of voting, casting your vote when it is part of a political system which is dominated by non-believers or kafir is seen as religiously outlawed, or haram.
Following from this, during the recent general election, Hizb ut-Tahrir told Muslims across the country not to vote, as it was forbidden by God. This may seem crazy, but the group is thought to have a membership of 2,000 to 3,000 people. And their invocation of Islam to justify a policy of anti-integration is a powerful message, especially when left unchallenged.
Zeyno Baran, director of international security and energy programs at the Nixon Center, a US think tank, says that that the West hasn't taken these non-violent radical groups seriously enough. "The West can no longer ignore the deadly impact of Hizb ut-Tahrir ideology, which provides very simple answers to complex problems and reaches millions of Muslims through cyberspace, the distribution of leaflets, and secret teaching centres," explains Ms Baran.
"Europe will only survive as Europe if it can assimilate Muslims, but what Hizb ut-Tahrir is teaching is not assimilation and it could be really dangerous for the future of Europe."
She see Hizb ut-Tahrir as part of a "conveyor belt of terrorism" and should not be left out of the security debate. "It is time to name the war correctly: this is a war of ideologies, and terrorist acts are the tip of the iceberg."
Ariel Cohen from the Heritage Foundation agrees that the focus shouldn't just be on violent Islamist groups. He says that violence is just a strategy. What is important is that jihadist groups and non-violent Islamist groups share the same ideas. "[These ideas] are inimical to democracy and human rights and women's rights and that is the lie of Hizb ut-Tahrir," he says. "Its goals are totalitarian and the debate about violence comes at the exclusion of other things. Hizb ut-Tahrir is indoctrinating tens of thousands of Muslims, enabling the creation of an environment for armed struggle." Mr Cohen says an example of this is how Al-Muhajiroun, a violent Islamist group based in the UK, uses the same ideological literature as Hizb ut-Tahrir, a non-violent one. It becomes easier for members to switch from a non-violent group to a violent group without having to change their fundamental beliefs.
So if these groups are so dangerous and divisive to Muslim communities and society at large, why haven't more mainstream Muslim groups acted against them decisively? Naseem Malik tells me that whereas before mainstream organisations wouldn't have criticised these groups directly, things are rapidly changing. "Within ISB there was that idea that you just say what you believe and don't necessarily go around condemning others."
He explains that this partly fits in with being English, where people don't necessarily make too much of a fuss, but he also says that shying away from direct criticism derives from a tradition in Islam.
"Within Islam there is a reluctance to publicly condemn people. Historically we have an imbalance of [lack of criticism], where on the one hand you've got to speak out for what's right but on the other hand you don't want to offend people," he says.
Naseem Malik believes that 7 July was a definite wake-up call and the decision to criticise directly was made only a few days before. "I think some people felt uncomfortable even after 9/11 but after 7 July we unanimously thought we've got to do this now. We have to fight back and come out for justice even if that means naming and shaming organisational groups."
At the same time, people within ISB tell me that they don't really understand how to get their voice heard. Their part-time media officer seemed to be surprised that a newspaper might be interested in what they had to say.
Stalin once said: "Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, so why should we allow them to have ideas?" If we are to tackle what has been happening, we have to acknowledge that ideas can be as dangerous as any bomb.
Mohammed Riaz, of the Leeds Islamic Centre:
These bombers were young and angry about certain things in Afghanistan and Iraq. But they are also out of control and there is nothing any of us can do to keep them in check because they do not listen to us. The police have to give us more support and help us find a way to bring hot-headed youths under control.
Natalie Rushton, 24, from Small Heath, Birmingham, has a five-month-old daughter, Dais:
The world seems to have gone mad in the last few weeks and I don't like the fact that anybody carrying large bags is somebody I look at with suspicion. It has affected race relations but it shouldn't. You can blame a whole section of society for the actions of a few.
Nick Perren, 43, of Southgate:
The bombings have divided the community. People are wary of foreigners, not just Muslims. I notice the divisions among the young, with the different groups all hanging around with those of the same nationality. I can't see the terrorists are going to achieve anything by it. Religion is supposed to be peaceful.
Aziz Hussein, 34, runs a fish and chip shop in Tooting:
I am a Muslim but I'm British as well and I do not like to be stigmatised. London has a diverse mix of people and faiths and it should stay that way, but people who don't have a right to be here shouldn't be. We should know who we let in and who we give money to.
This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/901