(3 of 5)
Police quickly pieced together the men's previous movements. A CCTV camera had recorded them earlier that morning at Luton, 28 miles north of London, where they caught a train to King's Cross. They were reportedly seen with a fifth man, still wanted by police. Authorities seized two rental cars left in the parking lot at Luton. One had been hired in Leeds by Shahzad Tanweer, 22, who transported Hussain and Mohammed Sidique Khan, 30, to Luton. The other was rented by Germaine Lindsay, 19, a Jamaican convert to Islam who lived in the nearby town of Aylesbury with his English-born wife. Explosive materials in one vehicle were washed out with high-pressure hoses before police took the cars away. In Leeds, police evacuated 500 residents and searched all the bombers' houses and other properties, including the suspected bomb factory. Locals said the house had been used as a meeting place by young men at all hours of the day and night.
As Leeds' Muslims struggled to absorb the idea that three of their own, whose parents were all born in Pakistan, had become mass murderers, initial accounts stressed how normal the young men had seemed. Tanweer, nicknamed Kaki, was a sports-science student who excelled at the long jump, wore flashy Western clothes and liked to drive a red Mercedes. Outside the King Kebab, one of his friends says he saw Kaki playing soccer the night before the blast. Khan, a well-liked adviser to children with learning disabilities, had rebelled against his family by rejecting an arranged marriage in favor of a woman he had met at university. His mother-in-law campaigned for the rights of Islamic women and had earned an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party for her community work. Hussain was not a very good student and liked to "clown around," according to his classmates.
A deeper look tells a darker story that is becoming sadly familiar in Britain and the rest of Europe--that of a disaffected younger generation drifting into radicalism under the blind eyes of immigrant parents, slowly giving up more of its energy to groups whose zeal and camaraderie offer it a sense of purpose. There its members are talent-spotted by jihadists for deeper indoctrination--and finally groomed for murder.
In Leeds the nexus for their slide over the edge appears to have been a youth-outreach project that was an offshoot of the government-funded Hamara ("ours" in Urdu) community center located in the rundown Beeston area. Khan did youth work there, as did another man, Naveed Fiaz, 29, who was arrested last week. Hussain and Tanweer regularly attended the youth center and played soccer there. Khan was described as an influential father figure to them. A local official told the Guardian he had reported to the police his suspicions that the center was being used as a front to radicalize young men.