London bombings 'were cheap'

2006-01-03 17:33

London - Police believe the four suicide bombers who killed 52 public transport passengers in July may have spent a few hundred pounds on staging the attacks, the BBC reported on Tuesday.

Detectives believe the expenditure was far less than that for similar attacks - less than one-tenth of the estimated $10 000 needed for the Madrid train bombings in March 2004.

Metropolitan Police declined to make any immediate comment on the report.

Investigators believe Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, was the group's chief's financier. Khan, who worked as a teaching assistant, appeared to have had access to the most money among the four suspect bombers, the BBC said.

Khan died in the attacks along with the other three suspected bombers: Hasib Hussain, an unemployed 18-year-old; Germaine Lindsey, 19, and Shehzad Tanweer, 22, who helped out at his family's fish and chip shop.

Attacks becoming cheaper

London police have said the four used inexpensive, peroxide-based explosives.

The BBC said the bombers had made preparations for their own deaths by paying off some of their debts, and at least one of the bombers had written a will. Khan left behind a videotape in which he explained his motives.

Within days of the bombings British Treasury chief Gordon Brown had urged his European counterparts to work more effectively to stop the financing of terrorism.

"There should not only be no safe haven for terrorists, but their should be no hiding place for terrorist finance. Our aim is to cut off the source of terrorist finance. We believe one of the ways we can get to terrorists is by investigating financial transactions that are supporting them," Brown said, days after the bombings.

But a United Nations report released in August 2004 revealed that sanctions and other measures taken to prevent funding to al-Qaeda had only "limited impact" in preventing terrorist attacks.

The report said the group's worldwide bombing campaigns were carried out relatively cheaply. It said that al-Qaeda has spent less than $50 000 on each of its major attacks since the September 11 2001, hijackings.

Magnus Ranstorp, terrorism expert and research director at the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies in Sweden, acknowledged the money needed to carry out attacks has fallen consistently since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, but says the benefit of investigating terrorist finances should not be underestimated.

"If the terrorists are lillywhites - or not known to the authorities - and their planning process is well executed, then I would say there is no problem of them launching a successful attack," he said in a telephone interview.

"Trying to stop terrorism through tracing and constricting financing is not going to be a panacea. But you cannot discount it. It's one way you can prove involvement by detecting elicit transactions and get an insight into how networks are changing."

- AP