Police identify fourth London bomber Staff and agencies Wednesday July 13, 2005
Guardian Unlimited Police today said they believe they know the identity of the fourth of the suspected bombers who killed at least 52 people in last week's attack on London's public transport. The man, like the other three, was British-born and lived in West Yorkshire. Police believe he was a friend of the other attackers and lived an outwardly ordinary life in the Leeds area. Three of the suspected bombers, who are thought to have died in the explosions, were named as Mohammed Sadique Khan, 30, of Dewsbury, and Hasib Hussain and Shehzad Tanweer, 22, of Leeds. Friends and family said they had no idea they had become extremists. Personal documents were found with the bombers' remains at Tavistock Square, where 13 died on a double-decker London bus, and at the blast sites at Edgware Road and between Liverpool Street and Aldgate East stations, police said yesterday. The fourth bomber's remains and documents are thought to have been found in the Piccadilly line tunnel between King's Cross and Russell Square stations, where at least 25 people died. Search teams are still looking for bodies from the carriages of the train. The four were described as "cleanskins" - with no convictions or known terrorist involvement - and the hunt is now on for the person or people police suspect may have masterminded the attack. A bomb factory was yesterday found in a raid on a house in the Burley area of Leeds but police believe the four suspects, who are all thought to be dead, lacked the expertise to plan the operation or put together the explosives. A key is to discover whether the bombs were detonated by timers or were manually activated in suicide attacks, meaning the bombers were considered expendable by a wider cell that could have other "cleanskins" ready to strike. A senior security source, speaking to the Press Association, said: "Where is the person who had the expertise to organise it all? "There is the possibility that it could be al-Qaida - someone who would have been sent to the country to do the preparation and then would have left the day before the attack. Is the capability [to mount an attack] still somewhere else?" Police are urgently trying to determine the origin of the high explosives used in the bombs in the hope that it could lead them to the principal planner. In Leeds, army bomb disposal experts were today working at the house in Burley where the explosives factory was discovered yesterday. Speaking at the scene where up to 600 people had been evacuated from their homes, Arshad Chaudhry, of the Leeds Muslim Forum said: "Our thoughts are of tremendous sadness. The whole community is completely appalled by what has happened. "It's not only the police who, after this, need to ensure these people are rooted out, but we need to get the assistance of the community itself." Explosives were also found at a car left parked near Luton station that police believe some of the four used to travel to the south-east before taking a Thameslink train to King's Cross. CCTV footage from Luton and King's Cross is still being scrutinised and film of the four at the London station in the 30 minutes before the attack is expected to be released today. The investigation into the bombings - codenamed Operation Thesis - is thought to be Scotland Yard's biggest ever, with cooperation from intelligence agencies around the world. Meanwhile Pakistan's interior minister has said a terror attack was thwarted in Britain before the May general election and arrests made in several countries because of help from his government. "Before the general elections in the UK we received reports that this sort of situation might arise, and attacks were aborted because of information provided by the government of Pakistan, and arrests were made in various countries and here," Aftab Khan Sherpao told a news conference in Islamabad. He gave no specifics, but said Pakistan was cooperating fully with Britain in the current investigation. "Whatever useful information that we have we will be providing to the British government," he said. Friends of Shehzad Tanweer, one of the suspects in last Thursday's London bombings, claimed he had travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan within the last six months. A local councillor told the Associated Press that all four of the presumed suicide bombers were British citizens of Pakistani ancestry. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
