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| Britain |
| Jamaican boomer worshipped with Reid, Moussaoui |
| 2005-07-16 |
| As Britain stepped up its global investigation into the London bombings, Egypt on Friday announced the arrest of an Egyptian biochemist in Cairo while the British police admitted that another potential suspect had escaped detection because he was not considered a serious security risk. Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said Friday that a man on a security "watch list" arrived in Britain several weeks ago but was not considered a high enough priority to be placed under full surveillance. The man left Britain several days before the bombings, two senior counterterrorism officials said. Sir Ian declined to characterize the man's importance to the investigation, but investigators said Friday that they had not established a link between him and the July 7 bombing operation that killed at least 54 people and wounded 700. Two British officials said the discovery that the man, who was not identified, had slipped through the nation's security net had caused some embarrassment for MI5, the domestic intelligence agency. The officials said they had learned of the man's movements during a review this week of the intelligence gathered in the weeks before the bombings. Sir Ian confirmed that the investigation had broadened in scope and predicted that eventually investigators would prove that Al Qaeda's network was involved. "What we expect to find at some stage is that there is clear Al Qaeda link, a clear Al Qaeda approach," he said in a BBC radio interview. For those links, the investigators are searching in Britain and around the world, relying on the help of a number of other countries. "There is a Pakistan connection, and there are connections in other countries," Mr. Blair said, though he did not identify the other countries. [Reuters reported from Pakistan that agencies looking into the London attacks had made four arrests in raids in the Osman Town neighborhood of Faisalabad, but what connection the arrests might have to the London bombings was not clear.] In Egypt, the Interior Ministry confirmed that the police had arrested Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, a 33-year-old Egyptian biochemist, in Cairo, where he was being questioned by British and Egyptian investigators. Mr. Nashar "denied having any connection with the latest events that occurred in London, and he pointed out that all his belongings are in his apartment in Britain," the Interior Ministry statement said. It added that Mr. Nashar had left Britain for a "scholastic vacation that would last for a month and a half, and he intends to return to Britain to continue his studies." Three senior counterterrorism officials said questioning Mr. Nashar was crucial to the investigation, but they added that it was still too early to determine whether he had played any role in the plot. The British police say three of the suicide bombers who lived in Leeds had traveled south and met together on July 7 at the train station in Luton, 40 miles north of London, with a fourth man, identified as Lindsay Germaine, a British citizen born in Jamaica. More details emerged today about Mr. Germaine, who worshipped at the same mosque in Brixton as Richard C. Reid, the convicted shoe-bomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man indicted in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, several American officials said. In a pub called the Hobgoblin in Aylesbury more than a year ago, presumably before he converted to Islam, Mr. Germaine pushed someone down a flight of stairs and was barred from the premises, said Lee-Anne Brown, a 19-year-old waitress. Two men who attend the Leeds Grand Mosque said Mr. Germaine resurfaced there last fall, and one said he was seen there as recently as a few weeks ago, saying he planned to move back to Leeds. A 24-year-old Egyptian man who gave his name only as Ahmad said that last November, Mr. Germaine spent close to 10 nights at the mosque praying and helping serve food during Ramadan. Zaher Birawi, a spokesman for the mosque, said he did not know Mr. Germaine, and denied that he had spent nights there. The police were still present at Mr. Germaine's squat, bay-windowed home in Leeds on Friday, removing a computer hard drive in a plastic bag. Investigators searched a community center and removed computers and raided and sealed off Iqra, an Islamic bookshop, where one of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, once worked, according to a shopkeeper there. Another bomber, Shehzad Tanweer, lived near the shop. The family of one of the bombers, Hasib Mir Hussain, 18, on Friday night described their son as a "loving and normal young man who gave us no concern" and said they were devastated by his role in the attacks. "Our thoughts are with all the bereaved families, and we have to live ourselves with the loss of our son in these difficult circumstances," the family said in a statement issued by the West Yorkshire police. "We had no knowledge of his activities, and had we done, we would have done everything in our power to stop him. We urge anyone with information about these events, or leading up to them, to cooperate fully with the authorities." In another development in the investigation, Mr. Khan, 30, was said to have had ties to a man arrested last spring in police raids, code-named Operation Crevice, against a terrorist plot involving ethnic Pakistanis, according to an American law enforcement official. The official added that European security services had observed the two traveling together, although he could not say where. Two officials said Friday that a Pakistani-American named Mohammed Junaid Babar, who pleaded guilty in June 2004 to providing material support to Al Qaeda, had told investigators he also knew Mr. Khan. Mr. Babar, who grew up in Queens, agreed to cooperate with Manhattan prosecutors after his arrest in March 2004, officials have said. He admitted to smuggling money, night-vision goggles, and other military equipment to Afghanistan, where he also set up a training camp for Islamic extremists and worked to aid a plot to blow up pubs, train stations and restaurants in Britain. Shortly after his arrest, the Operation Crevice raids arrested the plotters in Britain, officials have said. It was unclear exactly how Mr. Babar knew Mr. Khan. Earlier this week, Mr. Babar was provided with the names of the London plotters, and possibly with poor photographs of one or more of them, and said he did not know them, an official said. On Thursday, after he was shown a better photograph, he was able to identify Mr. Khan, the official said. European counterterrorism officials who initially said the bombers had used military-grade explosives have been told by the British police that the bombs were made, in part at least, from a cruder, home-made substance called TATP. It was also identified in the explosives used by the so-called Mr. Reid, the shoe-bomber, in his failed attempt to attack a Paris-Miami flight in December 2001. TATP stands for triacetone triperoxide and is used almost exclusively by terrorists and favored by Palestinian bomb makers, experts say, since it is too unstable for commercial or military use. Two senior officials said Friday that they had found TATP in one of the houses and one of the cars searched in Leeds. The "working assumption," one official said, is that the same kind of explosives were used in the London attacks. Underscoring that the investigation is still in its initial phase, Sir Ian said in the BBC interview that the four suicide bombers were mere "foot soldiers," adding that the organizers are still at large. He acknowledged the amorphous nature of terrorist cells, as well as limitations of British law, which do not give the police and prosecutors the sweeping powers to arrest and hold suspects, as is the case in countries like France, Spain and Italy. "Al Qaeda does not act like some classic Graham Greene cell," Sir Ian said. "It has very loose affiliations. and we have got to find the bankers, the chemists and the trainers all the people who are assisting in this." Scotland Yard is combing through enormous piles of telephone records, and several intelligence services of friendly countries were helping analyze the calls trying to detect any connection or lead that can help the investigation. The new breed of terrorists, particularly since the March 2004 bombings in Madrid, do not use cellphones in their communications, so searching the calls is a fruitless exercise, a European intelligence official said. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |