Looking for Trouble

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There is no dome, no minaret, nothing but a small sign to indicate that this rundown Victorian house in the multiethnic south London neighborhood of Brixton is a mosque. But the fact that would-be shoe-bomber Richard Reid and the alleged 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui both worshiped here during the mid-'90s has brought the Brixton Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre an unwelcome notoriety. Along with London's Finsbury Park Mosque and fundamentalist cleric Abu Qatada's prayer meetings near Baker Street, Brixton seemed yet another nexus of Islamic extremism in the capital.

But Brixton may not have been a willing terrorist...