Unraveling The Plot

Monday, Jul. 18, 2005 By J.F.O. MCALLISTER/LONDON
KILLERS: The four London bombers are seen arriving at Luton railway station at 7:21 am local time on Thursday July 7, 2005
METROPOLITAN POLICE / AP
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Although locals claimed not to have noticed anything unusual, all three men, in hindsight, had shown proclivities for radical Islam. Khan is said to have traveled regularly to Pakistan and Afghanistan for military training, according to a friend who spoke to the BBC. After Hussain got into some fights at his racially divided school, he went to Mecca on a pilgrimage with his father, who then sent him to study in Pakistan, hoping the teen would gain discipline. When Hussain returned to Leeds, he grew a beard and began dressing in traditional Muslim clothes. Tanweer visited Pakistan several times and last December went to an Islamic school near Lahore along with other young Muslims from Leeds, intending to stay nine months. He returned after three months to work part-time in his father's fish-and-chip shop, allegedly because the discipline was too hard. But he might already have secretly enlisted in the enterprise that came to a bloody climax on July 7.

How did the movements of the Leeds threesome go undetected? There are some 570,000 people of Pakistani descent in Britain, so despite efforts by both countries to keep an eye on the human ebb and flow, many trips raise no flags. A visit to relatives in Pakistan can easily be used as cover for something nefarious--or put an unsuspecting young man on a path he and his parents never planned. Ten thousand madrasahs are teaching Islam to more than 1.5 million students in Pakistan, including young Brits. A militant in Jaish-e-Muhammad, a group whose activists were responsible for suicide bombings in Pakistan as well as the slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, believes that Britain is a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaeda foot soldiers. "It's an ideal situation," he says. "The young Muslims over there are not happy with the way Muslims are being treated and want to do something about it."

But few authorities believe that the bombers acted alone. Investigators have focused on the explosives. Contrary to initial reports that said military-style high explosive were used, the authorities concluded that the bombs were made of TATP, an explosive popular with al-Qaeda because it can be cooked in a bathtub out of common chemicals. The bombs weighed only 6 lbs. each, according to a classified briefing for U.S. Senators last week.

British investigators have begun interrogating el-Nashar, who studied at North Carolina State University in 2000 and was awarded his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical enzymology by Leeds University in May. Someone with his training "could put this together blindfolded," says Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland. But Hany el-Nazer, president of the government-funded research institute in Cairo where el-Nashar worked, says el-Nashar's research was in biochemistry enzymology and pharmaceuticals and not related to building bombs or explosives.