http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050725/25london.htm
7/25/05 On the Terrorists' Trail >From London to Cairo to North Carolina--investigators are scooping up clues By David E. Kaplan and Thomas K. Grose The trail of evidence in Britain's worst postwar attack begins at least 20 feet below the surface, in three hellish tubes of twisted metal, body parts, dust, and rats. Since the July 7 London subway bombings, investigators have labored painstakingly to preserve these crime scenes, working in tunnels where temperatures have soared to 140 degrees. They are grisly sites. Even the dead, before they are removed, must be treated as evidence, their bodies searched for bomb fragments, blast residue, and identifying papers. The British are displaying the stiff upper lip they are deservedly famous for, getting on with life in London even as the toll has climbed to 54 dead and 700 injured in western Europe's first act of suicide terrorism. But the nation's investigators have been working overtime, pouncing on leads that might either nab the group's accomplices or fend off new attacks. The trail leads from the subway trains to a fourth bomb site--a double-decker bus hit an hour later--to the bombers' suburban homes and, now, overseas, to a Pakistan jihadist group, a Cairo jail, and a North Carolina university. As British authorities sift through thousands of leads, counter-terrorism experts warn that the hunt may be a long one. "Often there's no real golden nugget, no piece of evidence that brings it all together," says Neil Herman, who ran the FBI' s probe into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. "You're talking about fragments that are scattered over different crime scenes--a seemingly endless stream of evidence." Key to these investigations are the bombs themselves. Officials are hauling away tons of debris from the London Underground, sifting through the rubble in an effort to re-create the bomb devices: the timers, detonators, batteries, wiring--anything that might point to a manufacturer or a known technique. The bomb type will then be checked against a database of thousands of explosive devices. Another priority is the explosive. Investigators have gathered the blast residue and identified at least one component, triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a U.S. law enforcement official tells U.S. News . TATP is a high explosive favored by homemade bomb makers, used by suicide attackers in Israel, and in 2001 by British shoe bomber Richard Reid. Key may be the placement of the bomb. A casualty on the No. 30 bus had his head ripped cleanly off--a telling sign of a suicide bomber. >From long experience in Israel, investigators know that those holding explosives close to their chest will suffer horrendous damage to their torsos, but their heads and limbs will typically be blown clear. In this case, the remains matched the description given by a distraught mother from Leeds, in northern England, who called police to report missing her 18-year-old son, Hasib Hussain. He had told his family he was going to London to visit friends. That was the break police needed, and it came within a day of the attack. "Burning with fear." Much of London is under constant surveillance-- at least a half-million closed-circuit video cameras routinely scan the city. Armed with Hussain's photograph, a team of detectives set to work searching for the young man on dozens of tapes shot at King's Cross Station, the subway hub from where the three bombed trains departed. Four days after the attack, the team struck gold: Not only was Hussain spotted on the tapes; he was with three other young men--all of them were carrying backpacks. The quartet appeared on camera at 8:30 a.m., about 20 minutes before the subway bombs exploded. They looked relaxed as they talked and laughed among themselves before setting out in four different directions. "You would think they were going on a hiking holiday," one official told the British press. Investigators struck early the next morning in a series of six raids near Leeds, including the homes of three of the bombers. At one house, police discovered a possible bomb factory, with chemicals piled in a bathtub. At another home, authorities arrested a 29-year- old male relative of one bomber who was whisked to London for questioning. The trail led, as well, to an explosives-laden rental car parked at the Luton railway station, north of London, where the group apparently assembled before heading to King's Cross. Police theorize that the four men had planned to form a "burning cross" pattern across London, as each headed to a different compass point on the Underground. (Delays on the Northern Line may have prompted one bomber to hop the No. 30 bus.) The theory ties into a statement put out by the Secret Organization Group of al Qaeda of Jihad Organization in Europe, which claimed responsibility for the attacks. It read: "Britain is burning with fear, terror, and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters." "Clean skins." The four dead suspects raise a host of troubling questions. Unlike America's 9/11 hijackers, who were all Arabs from abroad, the London bombers were all British citizens. Indeed, at least three had grown up in Britain and came from middle-class backgrounds. None had terrorism files or major police records. They were, in the parlance of the security world, "clean skins" --an ideal terrorist sleeper cell. How many other clean skins are out there? U.K. intelligence officials have given Prime Minister Tony Blair estimates of as many as 200 Islamists in Britain who are willing to detonate bombs. John Stevens, former commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, says up to 3,000 British residents "passed through" al Qaeda training camps. Equally troubling is who's behind the four terrorists. "There's a whole other set of individuals that either assembled the devices, set up the residences where they were built, delivered them, or paid for the operation," says Herman, the former FBI investigator. "These are the more sophisticated people who flew in and may have escaped." Indeed, British police say they're searching for a fifth man who may be the plot's mastermind, while Cairo police have nabbed a sixth suspect, Magdy el-Nashar, a 33-year-old Egyptian chemical engineer who studied at Leeds University and North Carolina State University. Another connection leads to Pakistan, where at least one bomber may have had contact with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a jihadist group allied to al Qaeda. Authorities will be going back months, even years, into the suspects' lives, checking their past associations. Says one counterterrorism veteran: "This investigation is just getting underway." THE SUSPECTS SHEHZAD TANWEER. Age 22, from a well-to-do family in Leeds. Boasted a degree in sports science and had spent months studying the Koran in Pakistan. HASIB MIR HUSSAIN. Age 18, the son of a factory worker in Leeds. An avid cricket fan, he grew a beard and turned devoutly religious 18 months ago after a trip to Pakistan. MOHAMMED SIDIQUE KHAN Age 30, a university graduate who worked as a teaching assistant at a primary school in Leeds. Married with a toddler and a pregnant wife. LINDSEY GERMAINE. A Jamaican-born Muslim convert in his 30s from the southern town of Aylesbury. The only suspect not of Pakistani descent. Sources: police and news accounts With Chitra Ragavan and Aamir Latif -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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