Hate Around The Corner

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The four men who met at London's King's Cross railway station must have looked ordinary enough to the thousands of commuters rushing to work on the morning of July 7. Three were British-born — a 30-year-old grade-school teacher with a baby daughter and a reputation for devotion to his learning-disabled students; an 18-year-old described by friends as a "gentle giant," dressed that morning like the universal teenager, in denims and a sloppy jacket; a 22-year-old cricket fan who worked in his family's fish-and-chip shop in Leeds. The fourth was a 19-year-old Jamaican who had become a British citizen, married a British woman and had a young son, a man who seemed just "an ordinary Joe Bloggs to me," in the words of a neighbor. All four were carrying military-style backpacks, but even a vigilant passerby might have found that coincidence unremarkable. After several minutes of calm conversation, the men fanned out in different directions, in the full knowledge they were about to meet their deaths.

In the aftermath of terrorist attacks like the London subway bombings, it is often tempting to conclude that those who purposely commit suicide in the service of mass slaughter must be sick, evil, not quite human; they are not us. But as investigators pieced together the fragments of the plot that left at least 55 dead, Britons were forced to confront a reality nearly as disturbing as the attacks themselves: the killers were their own.

Three of the bombers lived in Leeds, an industrial city in northern England, and had grown up conventionally. All four were Muslims described by associates as amiable and law abiding but whose lives had taken a turn their loved ones did not detect toward radical Islam. And contrary to the early assumption that the bombers had hidden explosives in their rucksacks and left them to explode, or were unwitting mules for bombs their bosses had secretly armed, the weight of evidence suggests the attackers deliberately immolated themselves in the first-ever suicide bombings on British soil.

What remains murky is just how much help the homegrown killers received from like-minded jihadists scattered around the world. "We need to establish a number of things," said Peter Clarke, head of the antiterrorist branch of Scotland Yard. "Who actually committed the attack? Who supported them? Who financed them? Who trained them? Who encouraged them?"

The biggest police investigation in British history has already unearthed a number of links between the bombers and al-Qaeda, which counterterrorism officials fear may have other cells standing by. Police and intelligence services around the world have joined the hunt. On Friday, Egyptian authorities detained Magdy el-Nashar, a biochemist trained at Leeds University who left Britain at least a week before the attacks; he may have had contacts with the Leeds bombers, though he denies having any involvement in the plot.