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    One of four London suicide bombers
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Terror Networks
A Lesson the West Ignored From 7/7
2022-07-10


Long. The set-up:
Seventeen years ago today, four al-Qaeda jacket wallahs attacked the London transport system and in just under an hour that morning murdered fifty-two people from eighteen countries and maimed seven-hundred, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in British history. An important thread in the story was the role of Pakistain in fostering the ideological and material environment that created the killers, which did not get the attention it deserved at the time, nor in the years since.

THE PAKISTAN DIMENSION OF 7/7
At 8:50 on 7 July 2005, Shehzad Tanweer (aged 22) detonated his boom jacket on a tube train, a minute later another suicide bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan (30), detonated on a second train, and a minute after that another train was blown up by Germaine Lindsay (19). Thirty-nine people were massacred. At 9:47, a fourth suicide-killer, Hasib Hussain (18), went kaboom! on a bus at Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, slaughtering thirteen people.

The Security Service (MI5) confirmed that the killers had not been on their radar before the attacks, but once they were identified it became clear that Khan had been on the periphery of a prior investigation, Operation CREVICE, which in March 2004 had rolled up an al-Qaeda network in and around London that was planning to carry out a terrorist atrocity using a fertiliser bomb. Khan was found to have been in telephone contact with one of the conspirators, Omar Khyam, and both Khan and Tanweer had been briefly surveilled by the security services because of their contacts. After running various checks on Khan and Tanweer, it was determined that neither merited further resources: they seemed to be involved in minor fraud as part of financing the network, rather than having any involvement—and potentially not having any knowledge—of the terrorist planning that CREVICE was interested in.

Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5’s G-Branch dealing with international terrorism during this period and later the MI5 chief, noted later that the plot thwarted by CREVICE, led by Mohammed Qayum Khan, had been directed by al-Qaeda based in Pakistain’s tribal areas and involved "British citizens or British residents of Pak heritage, something which became something of a theme for this period". The 7/7 attack was in-keeping with this: all of its operatives (except Lindsay) were of Pak extraction, it originated in "plans from Pakistain", and indeed the logistics of the plot itself "did not fundamentally differ from all the other plans that failed to come to fruition" during the mid-2000s.

What only became clear after 7/7 was that in February 2004, Khyam had spoken in person to Sidique Khan in a car bugged by MI5, and from snippets of that conversation—and the testimony of a jihadist prisoner—British intelligence was able to work out, in retrospect, once they knew what they were looking for, that Khan and Tanweer had been to al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistain. It was a month after 7/7 when Pakistain handed over the photographs of Khan as he arrived there on 25 July 2003.

Pakistain’s reluctance to proactively assist—and its efforts to appear helpful in the aftermath—are hardly surprising. After tiring of the Mujahideen groups in the early 1990s, Pakistain’s Inter-Services Intelligence
...the Pak military intelligence agency that controls the military -- heads of ISI typically get promoted into the Chief of Army Staff position. It serves as a general command center for favored turban groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, tries to influence the politix of neighboring countries, and carries out a (usually) low-level war against India in Kashmir...
 (ISI) agency had turned to the Taliban
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
 as its instrument to conquer Afghanistan, which was largely completed by 1996, and it was under the ISI’s close watch that the Taliban became entirely intermingled with al-Qaeda and its derivatives like "the Haqqani Network", as it did with the "Kashmiri" groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the Army of the Pure, an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
 (LeT). It is analytically quite misleading to treat as autonomous "groups" what is in reality a fluid single network that shares personnel, geography, resources (everything from training camps to ammunition), and ultimately a unified command structure running through the ISI headquarters at Abpara.

Khan’s story testifies to this. Khan had, as it turned out, previously travelled to Pakistain and trained in a jihadist camp in Kashmir
...a disputed territory lying between India and Pakistain. After partition, the Paks grabbed half of it and call it Azad (Free) Kashmir. The remainder they refer to as "Indian Occupied Kashmir". They have fought four wars with India over it, the score currently 4-0 in New Delhi's favor. After 72 years of this nonsense, India cut the Gordian knot in 2019, removing the area's special status, breaking off Ladakh as a separate state, and allowing people from other areas to settle (or in the case of the Pandits, to resettle) there....
 in July 2001, before being taken over the border to a Taliban camp near the frontlines with the final pocket of Afghan resistance, the Northern Alliance. al-Qaeda was woven into the fabric of this ISI-run jihadist infrastructure, designed significantly for an unending ideological war with India, that ran through—and now runs through again—Kashmir and Afghanistan, which simply shifts personnel from front to front as Pakistain desires. As well as the second trip to Pakistain by Khan in 2003, it transpired there had been a third trip, between November 2004 and February 2005, on which Tanweer had accompanied him. Whether Khan and Tanweer went into Afghanistan during this trip is unclear; they certainly made contact with al-Qaeda.

The ISI’s fingerprints had also been visible in the earlier plot that Operation CREVICE has dismantled. In court, Khyam said the ISI was threatening his family in Pakistain because "they are worried I might reveal more about them" and therefore he was "not going to discuss anything related to the ISI any more". It was pointed out to Khyam by the judge that "inferences" would be drawn from this; he understood that, but inferences had less repercussions for him than giving evidence about the role the ISI had played in facilitating a terrorist plot on British soil.

Britannia has a special place in this long-standing, transnational ISI jihadist network:

Masood Azhar
...One of the major players in Pak terrorism. In early 1994, India incarcerated him for his activities. In 1995, foreign tourists were kidnapped in Jammu and Kashmir. The kidnappers included his release among their demands. One of the hostages managed to escape but the rest were eventually killed. In 1999, he was freed by the Indian government in exchange for passengers on hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 that had been diverted to Kandahar. The hijackers were led by Masood Azhar's brother, Ibrahim Athar. Once he was handed over to the hijackers, they fled to Pak territory despite the fact that Islamabad had earlier stated that any of the hijackers would be jugged at the border. The Pak government had also previously indicated that Azhar would be allowed to return home since he did not face any charges there. Shortly after his release, he made a public address to an estimated 10,000 people in Karachi, firing up the rubes against America and India...
, an ISI operative and United Nations
...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships...
-listed terrorist, toured Britannia in 1993, fundraising and recruiting for the Kashmir jihad, while laying down local networks to continue the job. Some of these networks later defected to the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
. Azhar had created a template for "Londonistan" in the 1990s, where jihadists set up shop in London to provide resources to insurgencies in the Moslem world. There was a de facto agreement with the British state that so long as this activity was directed abroad, the jihadists would not be interfered with.

What happened on 7/7 was a demonstration that this jihadist network ran two ways: what had been exported could come home. The realisation was slow in coming. In September 2005, al-Qaeda released a video to al-Jazeera of Khan’s last testament declaring his "war" on the West and praising "today’s heroes": the late Osama bin Laden
...... who used to be alive but now he's not......
, al-Qaeda’s then-deputy (now emir) Ayman al-Zawahiri
...Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as the real brains of the outfit. Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area assuming he's not dead like Mullah Omar. He lost major face when he ordered the nascent Islamic State to cease and desist and merge with the orthodox al-Qaeda spring, al-Nusra...
, and the founder of the Islamic State movement, which was at that time part of al-Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose real name was Ahmad al-Khalayleh.
And the dismount:
There was certainly some ignorance among Western officials about Pakistan’s game, but a lack of knowledge was never the real problem. The issue was fear, more precisely blackmail, that any challenge to Pakistan’s lawless conduct—its fundamental strategic commitment to the use of terrorism as a state policy under the protective canopy of pirated nuclear weapons—would make things even worse. As one scholar put it: “Pakistan has essentially developed its bargaining power by threatening its own demise.” If the West cut off the vast aid subsidies, let alone adopted a coercive approach to try to change Pakistan’s policies, Islamabad held out the prospect of instability that would lead to terrorists acquiring its nuclear weapons, so the West kept paying Pakistan to help solve a problem it created and sustained—and had every incentive to sustain, since without the problem there would be no more cheques.

Which returns us to the issue of Pakistani blackmail. Now that NATO is out of Afghanistan, with Western intelligence effectively blind, if and when a British citizen goes rogue, in or from Pakistan, the ISI will be there to offer a helping hand in finding them—for a price. And if Britain accepted the apparent necessity of cooperation with the ISI at a time when the ISI was killing British troops, it is unlikely this will change now. The mind-bending logic of relying on the organisation that nurtures the terrorist groups that threaten Britain will win out by bureaucratic exigency and inertia; what that ensnares Britain into giving away—whether in money or political concessions—will only become clear over time.
Link


Britain
Married couple with 'common interest' in violent jihad are GUILTY of plotting 7/7-style suicide attack
2015-12-30
[DAILYMAIL.CO.UK] An aspiring jacket wallah and his secret wife who had a 'common interest' in violent jihad have been found guilty of planning an ISIS-inspired terror attack on London after testing lethal bombs in their back garden.
Another pair of common, everyday Pak names.
Mohammed Rehman, 25, planned to blow up either Westfield shopping centre or the London Underground to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings.

His jihadi dream was funded by his wife Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, who used payday loans to buy fertiliser which her husband engineered into bombs.

The court heard how the couple, who wed in secret in a traditional Islamic ceremony,
Why in secret? Did someone's parents disapprove?
immersed themselves in ISIS and Al Qaeda propaganda and idolised 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer.

They even test fired one of their bombs in Rehman's back garden and recorded it on film.

Their plot was only foiled when Rehman - who called himself the 'silent bomber' - sent a tweet asking for advice on which was the best target.

As their plans gathered pace, Rehman asked his followers: 'Westfield shopping centre or London underground?'

The tweet - sent from a profile showing a photograph of Jihadi John - was accompanied by a link to the al Qaeda uncensored media release about the July 7 atrocities.

Officers then raided Rehman's home in Reading, Berkshire, where they found 10kg of nitrate explosives - double the amount of powder used in the failed 21/7 London bombings.

The prosecution said the would-be bomber was just days away from completing the device which would have caused multiple casualties in the capital.
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Britain
7/7 inquests: MI5 officer to give evidence
2011-02-21
A senior member of MI5 will give evidence later at the inquests into the deaths of 52 people killed in the 7/7 terrorist bombings in London in 2005. The officer, who will be referred to as Witness G, will be asked whether the attacks could have been prevented.

The bereaved families in court will be able to see him but reporters in a nearby annexe will only hear his voice.

Four suicide bombers detonated their devices on three Tube trains and a double decker bus on 7 July 2005.

Witness G will be asked about a key moment months before the bombings when the security service came across two of the terrorists during an investigation into another plot.

Many of the relatives of those who died want to know why those under surveillance were not subjected to detailed scrutiny. MI5 has always maintained it did not uncover any intelligence that would have identified the pair as potential suicide bombers.

BBC correspondent Peter Hunt says it will be a significant day as the senior MI5 officer will sit in the witness box and be questioned in public.
Lest we forget who the real terrorist criminals are:
The attacks were carried out by suicide bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Hasib Hussain, 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, 19. They targeted Tube trains at Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square and a bus in Tavistock Square.
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Britain
London bombers instructed by phone from Pakistan: inquest
2011-02-03
[Dawn] The ringleader of the July 7, 2005 suicide kabooms on London's transport system received advice from a mystery figure in Pakistain just days before the attacks, an inquest heard Wednesday.
I repeat myself: Pakistain currently holds the same position as al-Qaeda HQ that Afghanistan held in 2001.
Mobile phone records showed a series of calls made from phone boxes of Rawalpindi to bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, a police officer told hearings in London into the deaths of 52 people.

Metropolitan Police detective Mark Stuart said many of the calls were made through different Pak phone boxes within minutes of each other, suggesting that the caller there wanted to conceal their identity.

Hugo Keith, counsel to the inquests, asked Stuart: "Did you assess that those calls therefore were probably connected to some guidance or some means of communicating information concerned with the manufacture of the bombs and then ultimately their detonation?" "Yes, I think they had to be," replied Stuart.

The inquest heard that Khan never made any calls to Pakistain himself, but that he had instead given contacts in that country the numbers of four phones used purely for the purpose of the attacks.

Most of Khan's conversations with the unknown person in Pakistain took place between May and June 2005 but one lasting six minutes happened five days before the bombings, the inquest heard.

The final, unanswered call to the phone was made on the afternoon of July 7 after Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Hasib Hussain, 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, 19, had blown themselves up on three subway trains and a bus.

Khan and Tanweer are both known to have travelled to Pakistain in the months before the attack where they are believed to have had contact with members of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.

A video statement by Khan is believed to have been filmed there.

Britain's domestic security service MI5 has admitted it monitored Khan on several occasions before the attacks, including meeting members of a separate bomb plot, but that it failed to follow up the lead.

Britain opened the long-awaited inquests into the deaths of the victims in October and the hearings are expected to last until March. They will examine whether the intelligence services could have prevented the attacks.
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Britain
A View From London: Preventing the Next Mumbai
2010-10-06
It is almost two years since terrorists from Lashkar-e-Taiba traveled to Mumbai, India, and carried out a string of attacks on hotels, cafes, a Jewish center and other civilian targets. The horrific footage of those attacks spread around the world and raised obvious questions: Would it happen again -- and if so, where?

In the past week that question appears to have been answered. Increasingly credible reports have emerged claiming that Predator drone attacks in Pakistan have killed a number of people planning Mumbai-style attacks in Western European cities. This fits with the increased number of alerts and heightened threat levels across Europe in recent weeks. Last weekend the British Foreign Office changed its threat level to "high" from "general."

And there is another element of the story that suggests its authenticity: Two British citizens are among those reportedly killed in the Pakistan drone strikes, along with several German nationals.

Lashkar-e-Taiba certainly has links to the United Kingdom, the Western center of jihad. A comprehensive report published in July by the Centre for Social Cohesion, "Islamist Terrorism: the British Connections," revealed that 5% of the Islamists convicted of terrorism-related offenses in Britain over the past 10 years have links to the group. What is striking is the ambition of the plots they have been involved with.

Shehzad Tanweer, one of the suicide bombers who attacked the London transport system in July 2005, was associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba. So were British-born Omar Sheikh, convicted in a Pakistani court for his role in the killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and Rashid Rauf, the suspected ringleader of the 2006 trans-Atlantic airline plot (himself reportedly killed in a missile strike in Pakistan two years ago).

A further five men with links to Lashkar-e-Taiba have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes in the U.K. They include Dhiren Barot, the head of a U.K.-based terror cell that planned a series of attacks against major targets including financial buildings, and Omar Khyam,
whose parents clearly were poetry lovers...
convicted in 2007 for heading a cell that aimed to use fertilizer bombs to attack targets including a shopping center in Kent and a nightclub in London.

It is also significant that once again the source of this latest plan appears to have been Pakistan. In 2008, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown said three-quarters of the serious terror plots being aimed at Britain originated in Pakistan. The head of MI5 said last month that this figure now stands at 50%, but this reflects the troubling rise in activity in Somalia and Yemen, not a decreased threat from Pakistan.

Pakistan's ability to export security problems around the world -- as the Times Square car bomb reminded us -- continues to grow. The man who placed that bomb set the timing device at "7:00," but it was a 24-hour timer that should have been set at 19:00 hours (which was when he wanted it to blow). Only that mistake stopped the killing and wounding of countless people.
This is why MBAs are management, and not labour. One really doesn't want someone with that lack of attention to detail putting together one's car, or one's toothpaste.
The United States has, like the U.K. and Europe, been exceptionally lucky in avoiding recent attacks. But the paucity of recent attacks on Western cities has also been the product of exceptional work by our intelligence and security agencies.
Hear, hear!
As events in Pakistan remind us, our forces have repeatedly proved highly capable at infiltrating and eavesdropping, often allowing them to kill the terrorists before they can kill us. This is good and important work. But it must not make us think that we can always be entirely free from risk.

Announcements from American and British authorities are of questionable usefulness.
I disagree. When Mr. Wife travels abroad, I feel better knowing that he knows what situations to be aware of.
Telling tourists in Europe to be wary of public places may actually play into the terrorist game plan better than anything else. What are such tourists meant to do? Stay in their hotels? Not travel in the first place?
Being wary means being ready to recognize the problem and act to fix it, or at least to get out of the way while others do. A pack, not a herd, and all that.
Islamist groups aspire to carry out attacks like those in Mumbai precisely in order to trigger such fear. Civilian targets are attractive to terrorists because they are weak targets, with generally poor security unable to fight off attackers armed (like those in Mumbai) with rifles and grenades.
The policemen in Mumbai didn't have bullets for their guns, and their range time could be measured in single-digit days over their entire career. It's a bit different in Europe and America. Yes, the jihadis will kill some people, should they pull off an attack; but they won't be able to run free for four days like they did in Mumbai. Civilians on cell phones will take care of locating the problems, I should think.
But there is another reason that weak civilian targets constitute such an attraction: They produce terror in its purest form. Even leaving aside any devastation caused by the attacks themselves, any Mumbai-style assault in a city such as Paris or London could have an effect on the way in which the public approaches day-to-day life.
Or not. London seems to have recovered from the subway attack pretty well.
In 1996, the Provisional IRA exploded a bomb in the heart of Canary Wharf, London's financial district. The explosion killed two people and wounded dozens, but the financial cost came to an estimated $135 million. It requires very little money to pack a truck full of fertilizer and place it in a civilian area. And as the IRA famously said after attempting to wipe out the British cabinet in 1984, the terrorists only have to be lucky once, while we have to be lucky all the time.
And vice versa, when it's our guys who're doing the hunting, which they've been doing quite successfully lately. That's why the smart jihadis have moved to the soft jihad of the law -- it's less risky.
One of the most common taunts of Islamists is, "We love death more than you love life." At some point they will find another opportunity to demonstrate this. In the meantime, if death is so attractive, then we should do what we can to bring it to them.

DOUGLAS MURRAY is director of the London-based Centre for Social Cohesion.
President Obama was correct, if tactless, when he said we can absorb a hit if we have to. After all, we have before, mourned our dead, and taken the battle to the enemy's strongholds. That's not what will defeat us. Only submission to the desires of Caliphatists for special treatment will defeat us.
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Britain
I'm a victim too says the widow of 7/7 bomber, in legal aid claim that could delay inquest
2010-08-26
The widow of a July 7 suicide bomber yesterday launched a High Court bid to be represented at the victimsÂ’ inquest - saying she had also suffered the loss of a loved one in the atrocity.

Hasina Patel, whose husband was terrorist mastermind Mohammad Sidique Khan, is seeking legal aid to challenge the coronerÂ’s decision to exclude KhanÂ’s death from the hearing for the 52 victims of the 2005 London bombings.

If the mother of oneÂ’s application is granted, OctoberÂ’s long-awaited inquest could be delayed by months of legal wrangling, to the distress of those who have waited more than five years for it to take place.

Lawyers for Miss Patel claim there should be ‘no material distinction’ between her and the families of those killed, because she ‘equally suffered the loss of a relative’.

But the move will anger bereaved families, who do not want the deaths of the terrorists included in the same inquest as the 52 innocents whose lives they took.

Miss Patel hopes to overturn the decision made by Lady Justice Hallett in May to hold a separate hearing into the deaths of the four bombers - Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Hasib Hussain, 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, 19.

The Government has already agreed to give legal aid to the families of the 52 victims. But Miss PatelÂ’s request for equal funding was refused in May this year.

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India-Pakistan
Jaish-e-Mohammad build huge Pakistan base
2009-09-13
Jaish-e-Mohammad ("army of Mohammad"), which is linked to a series of atrocities including an attack on the Indian parliament and the beheading of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, has walled off a 4.5 acre compound just outside the town of Bahawalpur. Pakistani authorities have turned a blind eye to the new base, in the far south of Punjab province, even though it is believed to have been built to serve as a radical madrassah - Islamic school - or some kind of training camp.

British security sources believe Rauf helped organise the July 7 and 21 attacks in 2005. He was born in England to Pakistani parents and brought up in Birmingham where his father was a baker. It was in Bahawalpur that Rauf was arrested in 2006, before his mysterious and still unexplained escape from custody.

Bahawalpur is a backwater, a dusty, dirt-poor town which is swelteringly hot in summer. Its isolation allows it to function quietly as a centre for ideological indoctrination and terrorist planning, a jihadist oasis surrounded by parched fields. Once mentally prepared, promising students are dispatched to camps for training jihadists in warfare, in the north west of the country.

Aside from Rauf, two other two other notorious British-Pakistani militants had connections with Jaish: Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 2005 bombers of the London transport system; and Omar Sheikh, who was found guilty in Pakistan of the murder of the American journalist, Daniel Pearl. It emerged last week that British intelligence believes that Rauf is still alive, despite claims that he died in a US missile attack in Pakistan's tribal area in 2008.

Bahawalpur and the surrounding districts also serve as a safe resting place for jihadists battling in Afghanistan, including, it is believed, for British-born Muslims who go to fight there. They have respite from the threat of US spy planes that patrol the tribal area in the north west, killing militants with deadly missile strikes. In Bahawalpur alone, there may be as many as 1,000 madrassas, many of which teach a violent version of Islam to children, who are mostly too poor to go to regular school.

Jaish has its headquarters in Bahawalpur and it openly runs a imposing madrassah in the centre of town, called Usman-o-Ali, where it teaches its extremist interpretation of Islam to hundreds of children every year. The group was banned by Pakistan back in 2002 and designated by the US as a "foreign terrorist organisation". The Sunday Telegraph was prevented from entering the madrassah, which also has a mosque that should be open to everyone.

Jaish's new site, about 5km (3 miles) out of Bahawalpur at Chowk Azam, on the main road to Karachi, is much larger, with evidence that it could contain underground bunkers or tunnels. Surrounded by a high brick and mud wall, little can be seen from the road. However, The Sunday Telegraph discovered that it has a fully-tiled swimming pool, stabling for over a dozen horses, an ornamental fountain and even swings and a slide for children – all belying claims by the group and Pakistani officials that the facility is simply a small farm to keep cattle. There were signs of construction activity.

A man at the site, who gave his name as Abdul Jabbar, who wore a visible ammunition vest under his shirt, would not allow The Sunday Telegraph to enter, and suggested it was time for the newspaper to leave. "We're not hiding anything. Nothing happens here. We have just kept some cattle for our milk," said Mr Jabbar, who sported the long hair that is typical for Pakistani and Afghan Taliban. A man on a motorbike followed as The Sunday Telegraph drove away.

The new facility is known to the regional administration and, with a hefty army cantonment in Bahawalpur, the military would also be aware. It has deeply worried some Pakistani security personnel. One described it as a "second centre of terrorism", to complement the existing Jaish madrassah in the middle of town. The officer, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that Jaish should never have been allowed to buy the land. He said they initially acquired 4.5 acres, then they forced the adjacent landowner to sell them another 2 acres. "It's big enough for training purposes," he said. On the inside walls, there are painted jihadist inscriptions, including a warning to "Hindus and Jews", with a picture of Delhi's historic Red Fort, suggesting they will conquer the city.

Bahawalpur was where Rashid Rauf fled in 2002, after being implicated in the murder of his uncle in the UK. His family friend Ghulam Mustafa, a radical imam, ran a madrassah, the Dar-ul-Uloom Medina. He married Mr Mustafa's daughter, and his wife and children are still believed to live there. No-one was willing to talk about Rauf in Bahawalpur. Attaur Rehman, the deputy head of the Dar-ul-Uloom Medina madrassah, which is run out of an unmarked building in a back street and is closely associated with Jaish, said: "We don't say anything about this, I won't talk to you. I'm fed up with you media people."

Publicly, Pakistani officials insisted that the new compound is innocuous and even that there is no extremist threat in Bahawalpur. Mushtaq Sukhera, the Regional Police Officer for Bahawalpur, the most senior police officer for the area, admitted that the Usman-o-Ali madrassah in the middle of Bahawalpur "belongs to "Jaish" . He said that Jaish also owned the facility out of town. "But there's nothing over there except a few cows and horses," he said.

"No militancy, no military training is being imparted to students (at Usman-o-Ali)," said Mr Sukhera. "There is no problem with militancy (in south Punjab), there's no problem with Talibanisation. It's just media hype." Others tell a different story. Somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 men from southern Punjab are currently fighting jihad in Afghanistan or Pakistan's north western tribal area, according to independent estimates, said Ayesha Siddiqa, an analyst who has studied the area.

They are often known as the "Punjabi Taliban", whereas the main Taliban forces are ethnic Pashtuns, the group that straddles north west Pakistan and Afghanistan. "These guys [in Bahawalpur] aren't connected with a war, they don't have any ethnic affiliation with Afghanistan," said Dr Siddiqa. "These guys are purely ideologically motivated. That makes it much more difficult to crack them during investigation or to break their will to fight."
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Britain
MI5 to escape criticism over 7/7 bombings
2009-05-17
The long-awaited Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report into the suicide bombings which left 52 people dead and hundreds injured in July 2005 will effectively clear MI5 and the police of failing to prevent the attacks. Sources have revealed that the report, to be published on Tuesday, will state that no new intelligence has emerged since the publication of the first report in May 2006.

ISC report is said to be the most detailed ever compiled by the committee and will contain accounts of the tactics used by MI5 and the police during the monitoring of suspected terrorists.

The document will also reveal that MI5 monitored meetings in early 2004 between Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, who planned the 7/7 attacks, and Omar Khyam, the ring leader of a plot to blow up shopping centres and nightclubs. Details of their conversations will appear in the report but sources have said that there was no intelligence to suggest that the London bombings were being planned at that time.

The ISC document will show that MI5 knew that Siddique Khan and Tanweer were planing to travel to Pakistan to take part in Jihad, or holy war, in either Kashmir or Afghanistan, and that the two men were also involved in fraud to fund their activities. But, crucially, the report will show that at no time did MI5 obtain any intelligence that the 7/7 ring leaders were planning the attacks.

An intelligence source said: "MI5 had to put its resources into those suspects who represented a threat to life. It was known that Khyam was planning to carry out bomb attacks. That was not the case with Tanweer and Siddique Khan. Difficult decisions had to be made and those two men, although of interest, were not a prime threat. They were just two of many associates of Khan, and neither MI5 or the police had the capability to monitor them all."

The report's findings are unlikely to satisfy the survivors and family of those who died, especially if key questions remain unanswered. The investigation into the bombings cost ÂŁ100 million, the biggest inquiry in modern times, yet it failed to yield a single conviction.

The police and MI5 have conceded that it is now unlikely that anyone will be brought to justice for the attacks even though intelligence officials believe that 20 people were involved in the attacks. Last month the only three men to be charged in connection with the suicide bombings were acquitted.
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Britain
UK court clears three of plotting London bombs
2009-04-29
[Al Arabiya Latest] Three Britons were cleared on Tuesday of helping to plot the deadly London suicide bombings in July 2005 in the first prosecution over the attacks which killed 52 people and left more than 700 injured.

Waheed Ali, 25, Mohammed Shakil, 32, and 28-year-old Sadeer Salem were accused of having carried out a two-day reconnaissance mission by visiting various tourist sites in London in the months leading up the attacks on three underground trains and a bus.

A jury last year failed to reach a verdict against the men, who were found not guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions at Tuesday's retrial at London's Kingston Crown Court, the Press Association reported.

Prosecutors had said the three men were friends of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Jermaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain. The men attended the same mosque and gym in the tightly-knit town of Beeston, in northern England, prosecutors said.

Although they were not directly involved in making the bombs or carrying out the attacks, detectives believed the men had helped plan the attacks.

Ali and Shakil were convicted of a second charge of conspiracy to attend a place used for terrorist training. Prosecutors said they were planning to go to a camp in Pakistan when police arrested them in March 2007.

The court heard that the investigation into the bombings -- the largest ever carried out by London police -- discovered links between the men in mobile phone records, fingerprints connecting them to the bomb-factory in Beeston, family videos and surveillance.

Detectives found that about seven months before the bombings, Shakil, Saleem and Ali spent two days in London with Hussain and Lindsay, visiting tourist attractions such as the London Eye, the Natural History Museum and the London Aquarium.

They also visited locations similar to ones attacked on July 7 and detectives said the trip, the key element of the prosecution case, was part of preparations for attacks on the capital.

But the defendants argued the trip was to allow Ali to visit his sister and take in some tourist attractions.

The court also heard how in Nov. 2004, Khan, the ringleader of the July plot, recorded a farewell video for his baby daughter in 2004 before heading off on a mission to Afghanistan where he expected to die, prosecutors said.

Police have always maintained that the bombers had assistance from other people with links to al-Qaeda as they would not have had the technical expertise to construct the hydrogen peroxide-based bombs themselves.
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India-Pakistan
Pakistan: origin of three-quarters of all terror plots
2009-04-10
At least three in every four terror plots currently under investigation in the UK have their roots in Pakistan, according to the security services.
Decisions, decisions: surprise meter? Patience meter? Cynicism meter?
Whilst Afghanistan was seen as the training ground of terrorists in the immediate aftermath of the September 2001 attacks, recent experience has shown that increasing numbers of al-Qaeda extremists are being trained across the border in the tribal areas in the north west of Pakistan.

President Obama openly refers to his "Af-Pak" strategy for combating militancy, such is the prevalance of terror suspects who have been radicalised in Pakistan.
"have been" radicalized? They've been radicalized from day one.
Of the four men who carried out the London suicide bombings in July 2005, three were young British men of Pakistani origin who had travelled to the country to receive religious and military training.
Just rounding out their education, much like Brits of old would travel to the continent to learn about wine and which fork to use at dinner ...
Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the plot, was raised in Beeston, West Yorkshire, but was understood to have made regular trips to terrorist training camps in southern Punjab, and was captured on video at Karachi airport in November 2004 with his accomplice Shehzad Tanweer, 22, another British national of Pakistan origin. They returned to Britain the following February. The third bomber of Pakistani origin, Hasib Hussain, aged 18, had travelled to Pakistan 12 months before the attack.

Meanwhile, the alleged plot to bomb shopping centres in Manchester has been linked by MI5 to two al-Qaeda suspects in Pakistan - British Pakistani Rashid Rauf, who has been implicated in at least one other alleged terror plot, and Baitullah Mahsud, the leader of Pakistan's Taliban movement who has promised attacks on the West in hate-filled pronouncements in recent weeks.

So many UK terror suspects have links to Pakistan that thousands of innocent travellers between the two countries every year are now closely monitored for signs of suspicious activity.
Which apparently is wrong, or at least suspicious, since the poor dears will be traumatized by having been briefly considered as terrorists ...
Latest estimates suggest 4,000 young British Muslims have been trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan, and with 400,000 British citizens visiting Pakistan each year, there are fears that many more will become radicalised.
They aren't being radicalized in Pakistan, they are radicalized in Britain by imans in British mosques. They're going to Pakistan to polish their skills.
Monitoring of regular visitors has intensified, which has raised the possibility of a change in tactics by terrorists, who may have switched to using Pakistani nationals who may not be so closely monitored when they visit the UK.

Shahid Aslam, a British employment solicitor who runs an immigration consultancy in Lahore, said terrorists could easily take advantages of gaps in the British visa application process to enter Britain on a valid visa. He claimed there had been a number of cases where employees of agencies processing visa applications in Pakistan had accepted inducements to speed and guarantee entry visas.
So the agencies and their employees need to be screened, tossed and turned to Brit advantage.
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Britain
Detectives raid Leeds flat over 7/7 attacks
2008-10-09
Counter-terrorism detectives raided a flat in Leeds on Wednesday as part of the continuing investigation into the July 7, 2005 suicide bomb attacks on London.

Police said the action was to determine whether there were any links between the one-bedroom property in the Harehills area and the four men who killed 52 commuters in the London bombings. Three of the bombers: Mohammed Sidique Khan; Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain came from the Beeston area of Leeds, which was also the location for the men's bomb factory. "While it is more than three years since the attacks, this remains a painstaking investigation and as we have previously said we are determined to identify anyone else who knew what was being planned," said John McDowall, head of London police's Counter Terrorism Command. "As a result of our inquiries, we are carrying out an extensive search of the flat to determine whether there are any links to the people responsible for the 7/7 attacks."

Detectives were also renewing appeals for any information from the local community that could prove useful in their investigation and were planning to carry out house to house inquiries. "I would urge anyone who has suspicions about activity in the flat, either in the months leading up to the 7/7 attacks or afterwards, to contact police," McDowall said. Police say the search at the property was likely to take several days and there had been no arrests.

Khan, Tanweer, Hussain and Jermaine Lindsay blew up three underground trains and a bus using homemade, hydrogen peroxide-based bombs. Senior officers have always maintained that the 7/7 bombers had assistance from other people with links to Al Qaeda, as they would not have had the technical expertise to make the devices themselves. Detectives have also said they believe there are people who might have information who have so far remained silent.
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Britain
7/7 bomber's farewell video shown
2008-04-25
A home video of London suicide bomber Mohammad Siddique Khan bidding goodbye to his baby daughter has been shown to a jury at Kingston Crown Court.

The video was shown in the prosecution of three men alleged to have helped find bombing targets in the capital. Waheed Ali, Sadeer Saleem and Mohammed Shakil deny helping the bombers months before the attacks on 7 July 2005.

In the November 2004 video, Siddique Khan tells his daughter that he "has to do this thing for our future". The jury at Kingston Crown Court was told that in late 2004 Siddique Khan and fellow suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer flew to Pakistan. Prosecutors say that the leader of the bombers expected to die fighting jihad - but there was an unexpected change of plan while abroad which led to their return and the London bombings the following summer.

In the weeks before their departure, Siddique Khan recorded a number of home videos featuring his six-month-old daughter. Neil Flewitt QC, prosecuting, said the videos included a lot of "cooing over the baby" typical of any doting parents. In one, shot two days before the departure, Siddique Khan can be seen cradling his baby daughter in his arms. She is wearing a baby-suit and is jiggling on his knee.

The bomber is slightly off-camera for most of the recording as the lens is focused on the girl. His voice can be heard clearly and he frequently breaks off from speaking to kiss her. He is heard saying: "Sweetheart, not long to go now and I'm going to really, really miss you a lot. I'm thinking about it already.

"Look, I absolutely love you to bits and you have been the happiest thing in my life. You and your mum, absolutely brilliant. I don't know what else to say. I just wish I could have been part of your life, especially these growing up... these next months, they're really special with you learning to walk and things. "I just so much wanted to be with you but I have to do this for our future and it will be for the best, Inshallah [God willing] in the long run.

"That's the most important thing. You make plenty of dua [prayers] for you guys and you've got loads of people to look after you and keep an eye on you. But most importantly I entrust you to Allah and let Allah take care of you. And I'm doing what I'm doing for the sake of Islam, not, you know, it's not for materialistic or worldly benefits."

Mr Flewitt told the jury the video had come to light shortly after the bombings. Hasina Patel, Siddique Khan's widow, had handed some tapes to a friend in late 2004. At 1845 on 8 July, the day after the bombings, she handed more material to the same friend. On 13 July the friend handed them over to the police.

'Uncles' video
In another video, recorded in October 2004, Khan introduces his daughter to "her uncles", Waheed Ali and 7 July bombers Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain. The men are relaxing in the lounge at a house with a television on in the background. Siddique Khan calls Tanweer Uncle "Kaki". Mr Ali, sitting on the floor next to Hussain, gets up and kisses his own bicep in a jokey manner.

The jury were told of further footage to be played later which includes Hasina Patel. Mr Flewitt told the court that Ms Patel says: "There are two minutes left so say your piece."

Khan is said to reply: "My little sweetheart I love you lots and lots. You are my little baby with big fat little feet. Remember me in your Duas, I will certainly remember you, and, inshallah, things will work out for the best. Look after your mother, she needs looking after. Be strong, learn to fight - fighting is good. Be mummy's best friend. Take care of mummy - you can both do things together like fighting and stuff."
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