 |
Bombing ‘dupes’ believed they’d survive blasts
|
|
|
|
BOMBING ‘DUPES’ BELIEVED THEY’D SURVIVE BLASTS
PRE READING TASK
1. Why do you think even young people become suicide bombers in the Muslim world?
2. What are their motives?
3. Do you think the roots of this evil are deep in the their religion or a group of fanatics use religion for their purposes?
Police say the four had return tickets and did not have bombs strapped on as suicide bombers do.
Last night, senior police officers said they were examining claims that the four London
bombers had been duped. into killing themselves, along with 54 fellow Tube and bus passengers. " We do not have hard evidence that the men were suicide bombers, " a Scotland" Yard spokesman said. " It is possible that they did not intend to die. "
One hypothesis is that the bombers' al-Qaeda " controller" had told them that timers would give them a chance to escape, but that the devices were always primed to go off immediately. An official said:
" The bombers' masters might have thought they couldn't risk the men being caught and spilling everything to British interrogators. "
They point out that the bombers bought pay-and-display car park tickets and return rail fares, before boarding a train at Luton for King's Cross. None of the men was heard to shout" Allah Akhbar" (" God is great" ), which is normally screamed by suicide bombers as they detonate their bombs.
The devices were carried in rucksacks — not strapped to their bodies as is usually the case — so the bombers may have believed that they would be able to put the bombs down and get clear. The attacks in Madrid last year were carried out by bombers who got away. The London bombers also carried driving licences, bank cards and other personal ID.
Police at first thought that this was because they wanted to be acknowledged by sympathisers as " martyrs", but now they are not sure. Suicide bombers usually carry nothing that might identify them.
Last night, the Irish wife of Germaine Jamal Lindsay, 19, the Jamaican-born Muslim convert who killed 26 people at King's Cross, insisted that he was not a suicide bomber. Samantha Lewthwaite, 22, with their second child, said: " Lindsay would never have killed himself and left me alone to bring up our children. "
The belief that the bombers were suicides was based on the facts that they all died in the explosions, carried ID, and that one of them — the bus bomber Hasib Hussain — was decapitated, a common fate of suicide bombers. Investigators pointed out that they had found no evidence of timers, suggesting that the bombs were deliberately detonated by the terrorists.
" It is possible that they were duped into believing there would be a delay, but what we know is that they carried bombs onto Tubes and a bus and set them off, killing themselves and innocent people, " one senior officer said. The return fares and car park tickets could have been part of their " cover of normality’, he added.
|
|
|
It also emerged that captured al-Qaeda operatives had given at least two specific warnings that attacks were planned on London's transport system, and that Lindsay — who was said to have been dropped from a security service " watch list" — and Mohammad Sidique Khan, the Edgware Road bomber, were linked to a gang accused of afoiled terror plot-in Britain.
Investigators achieved an important breakthrough within days, by piecing together apparently unconnected pieces of the complicated jigsaw. One crucial discovery came as police officers studied CCTV footage from King's Cross at a video" suite in central London.
An officer trained in picking out suspicious characters in a crowd suddenly leapt from his seat. " Stop there, " he told the colleague. ‘Rewind a bit, stop! ’
On the screen hundreds of people milling around King's Cross station came to a halt, walked backwards a few paces and froze. There were smartly dressed commuters, travellers struggling with heavy suitcases, tourists in shorts, girls in mini-skirts. And, just off centre, four young Asian-looking men in casual clothes and with rucksacks on their backs. " Those four there, 'said the officer.
" Zoom in. " One anti-terrorist investigator said the four men " looked like they were going on holiday". But the sharp-eyed officer had spotted something in their movements, their gestures, their demeanour. After trawling through hours of film he had found the first pictures of the bombers. The images were recorded just before 8. 30am, 20 minutes before the attacks.
The CCTV footage tied in with other clues that led police to the bombers' homes in West Yorkshire and Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, with impressive speed. Papers carrying three of the bombers' names and addresses were found during painstaking searches at the bomb sites, and the mother of one of the bombers, 19-year-old Hasib Hussain from Leeds, reported him missing soon after the explosions. " We had three Muslim gays from Yorkshire who were together at King's Cross and then killed in separate bomb explosions, " an anti-terrorist officer said. " There was no way that could be just a coincidence. "
The bombers' movements were becoming clearer: Hussain, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, both from Leeds, and Khan, 30, from Dewsbury, a married father of a one-year-old, had driven down from Yorkshire, with the bombs, and had joined Lindsay at Luton. From there they had taken a train to King's Cross, before going their separate ways to kill and maim during London's morning rush-hour.
Police are still trying to find out what Hussain did between leaving King's Cross at 8. 30 and blowing up the No 30 bus in Tavistock Square. One theory is that he intended to go north on the Northern Line to complete a " burning cross" of explosions to the north, south, east and west of King's Cross, but was foiled because a defective train had closed the line.
Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, warned of more bombs. [8]
David Harrison the Sunday Independent
|
|
|
