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| An al-Qaeda link to the London attacks? |
| 2005-09-04 |
| Kohlmann's comments in another article I'm posting tonight pretty much sum this one up for me. Where's the "Master of the Obvious" graphic? American and British investigators say a new video featuring a July 7 London subway bomber and Qaeda chief deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri is authentic. These counterterror officials, who asked not to be named because of the sensitive subject matter, say the tape, aired last Thursday by Al-Jazeera, appears to affirm a link between Al Qaeda and the July 7 attacks—but it doesn't prove Zawahiri or Qaeda head Osama bin Laden ordered them. In the slick video, which the officials think was assembled from two separately shot tapes, suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan says he is a "soldier" intent on "protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters." He asks Allah to "raise me amongst those I love," a group that includes bin Laden, Zawahiri and Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of the Iraqi insurgency. Khan does not say that the Iraq war was a motivation for the attacks. But Zawahiri does praise them as a "slap in the face" to Tony Blair's British government for its alleged collaboration with Washington in oppressing Muslims in countries including Iraq. The British official says authorities believe the tape may have been put together up to three months ago; they don't know if the video, in which Khan spoke in the soft accent of his native Yorkshire, was taped in Britain or Pakistan, which he reportedly visited several months before the London bombings. The British investigation into the terror acts—four incidents on July 7 that killed more than 50, and another four attempted attacks on July 21 in which the bombs didn't explode—appears to have bogged down in past weeks. Though numerous suspects, including the would-be bombers themselves, were picked up and charged for the July 21 attacks, nobody has been arrested for the July 7 bombings. This lack of progress led some British investigators to claim recently that the July 7 bombers may have been a self-generated cell. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |