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Bombers not on security files
13/07/2005 14:28 - (SA)
London - The British authorities said on Wednesday they were hunting for the masterminds of last week's bombings in London that were carried out by four men, apparently Britons, who "blew themselves up."
British newspapers said the four who carried out the bombings last Thursday that killed at least 52 people on three underground trains and a bus in London were all Britons of Pakistani origin.
None of the four were on the files of security services, papers said, making them so-called "cleanskins" - terrorists with no previously known link to suspicious groups.
In interviews on Wednesday, home secretary Charles Clarke, who is visiting Brussels to confer with his European Union counterparts, said the four were suicide bombers and the police were now hunting for those who worked with them.
In an interview with BBC Radio, Clarke said "we have to attack the people who are driving, organising and manipulating those people," who carried out the bombings on British territory.
He said the authorities must tackle the roots of the problem by dealing with "anybody who preaches the kind of fundamentalism..." British newspapers expressed the shock of a nation that four Britons had carried out suicide bombings.
Brief goodbye
A series of newspapers papers named two of the dead suspected bombers as Hasib Hussein, 19, and 22-year-old Shehzad Tanweer, who lived in Leeds.
The Daily Mail said that Hussein carried the bomb that exploded on a packed double-decker bus in central London, while Tanweer detonated a device on the London Underground near Edgware Road station, to the west of the city.
The paper named 30-year-old father of one Mohammed Sadique Khan, also from Leeds, as having been responsible for another subway blast near Aldgate station, just east of the city centre.
The Independent newspaper, however, identified the Edgware Road attacker as Eliaz Fiaz, 30, from Dewsbury, a town near Leeds.
All the reports, which cited a variety of intelligence and police sources, said the bombers travelled to London's central King's Cross station together by commuter train from Luton, a town just north of the capital.
After a brief and undemonstrative goodbye, they separated to launch their attacks in Thursday morning's rush hour.
Police gained vital clues when Hussein's parents, who knew their son was in London and were unable to contact him by phone after the bombs went off, called the police, The Times said.
Investigators picking through the remains of the devastated bus found a body wearing clothes similar to those Hussein was reported as last wearing, and also noticed he seemed to have been very close to the blast, prompting suspicions he might be the bomber.
This led to police examining security camera footage from King's Cross to spot Hussein and three other young men travelling together - all carrying rucksacks.
The revelation that the bombers might well be born-and-bred Britons caused consternation in many papers on Wednesday.
- AFP
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