Lives of Three Men Offer Little to Explain Attacks (NY Times)

[stickdog]

The NY Times with the understatement of the year ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/14/international/europe/14leeds.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print

...

As the identities of these suicide bombing suspects slowly emerged Wednesday behind a thicket of disbelief, the question that nobody in these neighborhoods could answer was this: What kind of radical force threw the three men together, with another bomber, to commit such a heinous crime against their country, the one they rooted for in soccer matches, and their people?

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A few miles away, in Dewsbury, a more kempt suburb of Leeds, Mr. Khan, 30, the man suspected of blowing up the bomb at the Edgware Road subway station, moved recently into a small terrace house with his wife and daughter. By day, Mr. Khan, who was born in Pakistan but reared in Leeds, worked with disabled students at a center or a school, neighbors said. He was not particularly devout, and few neighbors said they could remember seeing him at the mosque. In fact, neighbors said he married without even telling his family. His parents found out after the fact, they told reporters. His mother-in-law, Farida Patel, is a teacher and a prominent community worker whose father campaigned against apartheid in South Africa, a local official, Khizar Iqbal, said.

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Mr. Tanweer lived in a large house and drove his father's red Mercedes on occasion. He wore brand-name clothes, worked out at a gym and took classes in the martial arts. He studied sports science at Leeds Metropolitan University, and when he could, he worked at his father's fish and chips shop for extra money.

Everyone who knew him described him as infinitely likable. Terrorism seemed the farthest thing from his mind, his friends said. "He was a good lad, so down-to-earth," said a friend who played cricket with him the day before the bombing. Although the neighborhood is poor, people of South Asian origin own most of the businesses. There is a sense, at least among these families, that they were moving up the ladder, rather than down it.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/14/MNGR7DNPP41.DTL

'ORDINARY BRITISH LADS'

TERROR IN LONDON: Three of the four suspected suicide bombers in last week's deadly attacks had no police records or pasts that would arouse suspicion or alert anti-terror squads

Zachary Coile, Chronicle Staff Writer

Leeds, England -- One was a skilled cricket player who gave up drinking and women to lead a more devout life. Another was the son of a local businessman who ran a fish and chips shop. One was a counselor who worked with disabled children. To their friends and relatives, the men identified by British police as the suicide bombers in last week's attacks on London's transit system were "ordinary British lads" who fit in seamlessly in this multiethnic former textile mill town.

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Shahzad Tanweer, 22, had studied sports science at a local university, learned tai kwon do and judo. The eldest son of Mohammed Mumtaz, owner of the popular South Leeds Fishery fish and chips shop, Tanweer had recently returned from a trip to Pakistan. "I've known him for years; we used to go boxing together," said Jaz Singh, a friend of Tanweer. "He was very bright and loved sports -- football, cricket. It's completely out of character for him. Someone must have brainwashed him and made him do it."

Outside the brick home of another identified bomber, 19-year-old Hasib Hussain, police were assembling scaffolding in the front yard to aid in the forensic search. A cricket fanatic, Hussain had played in a match just few days before last Thursday's attacks.

Thirty-year-old Mohammed Sidique Khan worked as a counselor in a youth center, where he worked with the disabled. He was born in Pakistan but grew up in Leeds. He and his wife have an 8-month-old daughter and recently moved to a new home in nearby Dewsbury. Documents belonging to Khan were found in the debris of the Edgware Road subway blast, police said.

Many of the alleged bombers' teenage and 20-something friends on Beeston Hill were convinced that police had wrongly blamed the local men. Some said they believed their friends had been passengers aboard the trains and buses when the attacks took place. Others theorized that the government had trumped up evidence to try to pin the attacks on Muslims.


http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/07/14/bombing_suspects_identities_shock_leeds/

Bombing suspects' identities shock Leeds
Acquaintances say they saw no signs

By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff | July 14, 2005

LEEDS, England -- Shehzad Tanweer, the 22-year-old son of Pakistani immigrants, appeared to be the epitome of assimilation into British society, an ambitious college graduate with a degree in sports science who excelled at cricket and just about any other sport he tried.

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Tanweer was hardly among Britain's poor, disaffected youth. His father, Mohammed, arrived here from Pakistan 30 years ago without a penny to his name, and went on to become a man of some prestige and considerable property. He owns a small but lucrative fish-and-chips shop on the main street of Beeston, a neighborhood that is home to many of the sizable Muslim population. He also has a butcher shop and a curry take-out business. His white semidetached house on Colwyn Road is bigger and better maintained than most homes in the area.

Residents of Leeds say that Khan, the oldest of the three known suspects, was a primary school teacher in the city, and that he taught martial arts at a community drop-in center, where Tanweer and Hussain were among his students. They said Khan was the only one of the three Leeds suspects who was born in Pakistan. Khan and his wife had a daughter last December. ''You wouldn't think a man with a little baby would blow himself up, would you?" Shabaz asked.

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About 12 hours after police say Hussain blew up a double-decker bus, killing himself and 12 other passengers, his mother, Maniza, called the police, saying Hussain was missing and that she feared he had been a victim of the bombing. She said he had traveled down to London that day with his friends. She later gave police a photograph of him, and on Monday night, when detectives combing through some 2,500 different pieces of closed-circuit camera film came across an image of Hussain standing in the middle of King's Cross station with three other young men of Pakistani descent, each of them holding backpacks, police had their big break. The next day, antiterrorism police burst into the homes of the Hussains, the Tanweers, and four other families in Leeds.