A TIME OF TORMENT: Britons were horrified when police revealed three of the bombers were from Leeds
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As Leeds' Muslims struggled to absorb the idea that three of their own, whose parents were all born in Pakistan, had become mass murderers, initial accounts stressed how normal the young men had been. Tanweer, nicknamed Kaki, was a sports-science student who excelled at the long jump, wore flashy Western clothes and liked to drive a red Mercedes. Outside the King Kebab, one of his friends told Time he saw Kaki playing soccer the night before the blast. Khan, a well-liked adviser to children with learning disabilities, had rebelled against his family by rejecting an arranged marriage in favor of a woman he had met at university. His mother-in-law campaigned for the rights of Islamic women and had earned an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party for her community work. Hussain, 18, was not a very good student and liked to "clown around," according to his classmates. A deeper look tells a darker story that is becoming sadly familiar in Britain and the rest of Europe: of a disaffected younger generation drifting into radicalism under the blind eyes of immigrant parents, slowly giving up more of their lives to groups whose zeal and camaraderie offer them a sense of purpose. There they are talent-spotted by jihadists for deeper indoctrination — and finally groomed for murder.
In Leeds, the nexus for their slide over the edge appears to have been a youth outreach project that was an offshoot of the government-funded Hamara ("Ours," in Urdu) community center located in the rundown Beeston area. Khan did youth work there, as did another man, Naveed Fiaz, 29, who was arrested last week. Hussain and Tanweer regularly attended the youth center and played soccer there. Khan was described as an influential "father figure" to them. A local official told the Guardian he had reported to the police his suspicions that the center was being used as a front to radicalize young men.
Though locals claimed not to have noticed anything unusual, all three men, in hindsight, had shown proclivities for radical Islam. Khan is said to have traveled regularly to Pakistan and Afghanistan for military training, according to a friend who spoke to the bbc After he got into some fights at his racially divided school, Hussain went to Mecca on a pilgrimage with his father, who then sent him to study in Pakistan, hoping he would gain discipline. When Hussain returned to Leeds, he grew a beard and began dressing in traditional Muslim clothes. Tanweer visited Pakistan several times and last December went to an Islamic school near Lahore along with other young Muslims from Leeds, intending to stay nine months.
He returned after three months to work part-time in his father's fish-and-chip shop, allegedly because the discipline was too hard. But he may already have secretly enlisted in the enterprise that came to a bloody climax on July 7.
How did the movements of the Leeds threesome go undetected? There are some 570,000 people of Pakistani descent in Britain, so despite efforts by both countries to keep an eye on the human ebb and flow, many trips raise no flags. A visit to relatives in Pakistan can easily be used as cover for something nefarious — or put an unsuspecting young man on a path he and his parents never planned. Ten thousand madrassas are teaching Islam to more than 1.5 million students in Pakistan, including young Brits. A militant in Jaish-e-Muhammad, a group whose activists have been responsible for suicide bombings in Pakistan as well as the slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, told Time that Britain is now a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaeda foot soldiers. "It's an ideal situation," he says. "The young Muslims over there are not happy with the way Muslims are being treated and want to do something about it."