Show of Resolve as Religious Leaders Try to Cool Tensions


By
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ALAN%20COWELL&fdq=199601
01&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ALAN%20COWELL&inline=nyt-per> ALAN COWELL

New York Times

July 11, 2005

LONDON, July 10 - A World War II commemoration on Sunday became a show of
nostalgia and defiance, while Britain's religious leaders held a meeting to
help thwart any violence against Muslims following Thursday's terrorist
attacks.

There were no new leads in the case, although optimism rose briefly for a
few hours when police announced that three Britons arriving at Heathrow
Airport had been arrested. The three were later released without charge. 

In a sign of the authorities' desperation for clues, the police appealed to
citizens to hand over any images taken at the sites of the attacks with
cameras or cellphones because they might contain crucial information. At
least 49 people were killed and more than 700 wounded in the attacks on
three subway trains and a double-decker bus, the worst terrorist attack in
Britain in decades. 

>From a balcony at Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth II and her family
watched a wartime Lancaster bomber drop one million red poppies over a crowd
of thousands of veterans thronging the Mall in bright sunshine in front of
her. 

The commemoration of the ending of World War II had been arranged months in
advance, but it became a display of Britain's ambiguous mood - part resolve,
part nervousness - after the terror attacks.

"The terrible thing today is that we don't know our enemies," said Dennis
Jardine, an 81-year-old veteran in a wheelchair outside a memorial service
at Westminster Abbey. "I knew who my enemy was because we all had our
uniforms. So what can you really do against it?"

While rescue workers toiled deep underground to retrieve bodies from one
bombed subway tunnel, the country's most senior Christian, Jewish and Muslim
leaders gathered, anxious to head off religious tensions caused by the
attacks, which the authorities have said bear the hallmarks of Islamic
extremists. A number of retaliatory acts against Britain's Muslim population
have been reported since the attacks.

The religious leaders sought to distinguish between Islam as a faith and as
a label for the terrorists.

Sheik Zaki Badawi, head of Britain's Council of Mosques and Imams, said:
"Anyone claiming to commit a crime in the name of religion does not
necessarily justify his position in the name of that religion. People do
things in the name of Islam which are totally contrary to Islam."

He was speaking alongside other religious leaders - Sir Jonathan Sacks,
chief rabbi; Rowan Williams, the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury; Cardinal
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster; and
David Coffey, the moderator of the Free Churches.

Each took turns to read from a shared statement urging what Dr. Williams
called "the continuing efforts to build a Britain in which different
communities - including faith communities - can flourish side by side."

At St. Pancras Parish Church, close to Tavistock Square where 13 people died
in the Thursday bombing of a No. 30 double-decker bus, Paul Hawkins, the
vicar, urged 100 congregants to "name the people who did these things as
criminals and terrorists, but we must not name them as Muslims."

None of the 49 people believed to have been killed have been formally
identified under painstaking British procedures, and so there is, so far, no
official list of the dead.

Charles Clarke, the home secretary, said he was "very optimistic" that the
bombers would be captured. But, like other officials, he warned of possible
future attacks. "Our fear is, of course, of more attacks until we succeed in
tracking down the gang that committed the atrocities. That is why the No. 1
priority has to be the catching of the perpetrators."

Sir John Stevens, the former head of the Metropolitan Police, said in a
newspaper interview on Sunday that the bombers were "almost certainly"
British. "I'm afraid there's a sufficient number of people in this country
willing to be Islamic terrorists that they don't have to be drafted in from
abroad," he said.

He said the probable suspects would be "highly computer literate; they will
have used the Internet to research explosives, chemicals and electronics."

He said he believed that the suspects would be "apparently ordinary British
citizens, young men conservatively and cleanly dressed and probably with
some higher education."

"They are also willing to kill without mercy - and to take a long time in
their planning," he said.

"We believe that up to 3,000 British born or British-based people have
passed though Osama bin Laden's training camps over the years," he said.
"Plainly, not all went on to become active Islamic terrorists back in the
U.K., but some have. "

The bombings also rippled through the world of arts and entertainment with
the inevitable moments of bitter irony and bad taste. 

Waterstone's bookshop in London scrambled to cancel print advertisements for
"Incendiary," a new novel written in the form of a letter to Mr. bin Laden
by a woman whose husband and son died in a London terrorist attack, the BBC
News reported.

But some of the ads were irretrievable, including posters already hung in
the London Underground, where three of the four bombs went off. 

Vandalism at New Zealand Mosques 

WELLINGTON, New Zealand, July 10 (AP) - Four mosques were vandalized in
northern New Zealand overnight Sunday, leaving windows smashed and walls
splashed with graffiti, the police said.

They declined to say whether the attacks were linked to the bombings in
London on Thursday.

But Prime Minister Helen Clark immediately condemned the attacks, linking
them to retaliation. "New Zealanders across all communities are horrified by
the terrorist attacks in London, which are the work of evil people," she
said in a statement. "But it is wrong to target the Muslim community here in
retaliation."

Souad Mekhennet and Jonathan

Allen contributed reporting for

this article.



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