Unraveling The Plot

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The bombers' trail may also lead to Pakistan. A Pakistani official says British investigators want to reinterrogate Naeem Noor Khan, 25, a Pakistani arrested in Karachi last year who admitted being a top al-Qaeda communications man. His confession and computer archives led to charges of conspiracy to commit murder and other terrorism offenses being lodged against eight men in Britain last August. Khan's former boss, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan in U.S. custody who may be bin Laden's No. 3 and is believed to have directed al-Qaeda's cells in London, told his interrogators about a plot to attack London's transport system in May that was later aborted, according to Pakistani investigators. British officials are trying to gain access to Zeeshan Siddique, a British national arrested with a false passport in May 2005 in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar; he eventually confessed he was part of a plot to bomb pubs, restaurants and rail stations in Britain. He wrote a cryptic note saying one of his comrades told him that an operation code-named the "Wagon" had been postponed--which might have referred to the bombings that eventually took place July 7.

For all the talk of British flintiness in the face of tragedy, the realization that the attack was carried out by homegrown militants cast an added pall over London as the city's residents poured onto the streets to remember the dead in silence. Ian Blair, London's police chief, says he hopes the tragedy of July 7 has jolted the "99.99% of the Muslim community who don't want any of this" into greater vigilance. "Bombers need supporters. It's the community that defeats terror, not the police," he said.

As Britain's Muslims coped with the shock of finding killers in their midst, shame and disgust were mixed, inevitably, with fury. "You whites, you're all thieves! You're all the same!" a Muslim acquaintance of the suspects yelled at a TIME reporter in Leeds. "You and George thieving Bush, you're all the same. Now you can victimize us even more. Now you can post police everywhere spying on us." After he left, some of his friends, embarrassed by his outburst, offered reassurance that his views were unusual. "He's not like that all the time. He's a really nice lad," said one. The big challenge after London is to prevent more nice lads from growing up to be terrorists. --With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr., Brian Bennett, Sally B. Donnelly and Adam Zagorin/ Washington, Jessica Carsen/Leeds, Helen Gibson and Ghulam Hasnain/London, James Graff/ Paris, Tim McGirk/ Islamabad, Amir Mir/ Lahore and Lindsay Wise/Cairo