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How London brought
terror on itself
By B Raman
That three of the suspected perpetrators
of the bomb attacks on London on July 7 were
British youths of Pakistani origin should not only
have been no surprise to British intelligence, it
should have been anticipated: the radicalization
of Britain's Muslim youth of Pakistani origin
began in the mid-1990s with the full knowledge and
complicity of British and US intelligence
agencies.
In the mid-1990s, the
Pakistan-based jihadi group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
(HUM - previously known as the Harkat-ul-Ansar,
HUA ) sent a contingent to help Bosnian Muslims in
their fight against the Serbs. They were sent by
the government of Benazir Bhutto at the request of
the Bill Clinton administration. The contingent,
which was raised and trained by Lieutenant General
(retired) Hamid Gul, former director general of
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who
himself used to visit Bosnia, included a large
number of British Muslims of Pakistani origin.
According to estimates, about 200 Muslims
of Pakistani origin living in the United Kingdom
went to Pakistan, received training in the camps
of the HUA, and joined the HUA in Bosnia with the
blessings of London and Washington. Among them was
Omar Sheikh, who went on to mastermind the murder
of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.
A
decade before Bosnia, the CIA had raised and
funded a large corps of jihadis of Arab origin -
including Osama bin-Laden - to help the Afghan
mujahideen in their jihad against Soviet troops in
Afghanistan in the 1980s.
By the time of
the Serbian crisis, these Arabs of Afghanistan
vintage had already started creating mayhem beyond
Afghanistan, notably in Indian-held Kashmir, so
Western intelligence wanted to avoid the use of
Arabs in Bosnia. They turned to Pakistanis,
particularly Pakistanis living in Britain and
other countries in Western Europe. Thus began the
radicalization process of Muslim youth of
Pakistani origin in western Europe.
Links to Pakistan
The first
three of four people believed to have carried out
the four London attacks have been named.
Shehzad Tanweer. Aged 20 to 22,
lived in Leeds. Believed to have blown himself up
on a subway train near Aldgate station. He
sometimes worked at his family's fish and chip
shop in a suburb of Leeds. Described as a good
student who played cricket for a local team.
Reportedly went to Lawnswood school in Beeston,
before studying sports science at Leeds
University. He did not have a regular job.
According to the Guardian, he recently travelled
to Pakistan. His father, Mohammed Mumtaz, was
originally from the Faisalabad region of Pakistani
Punjab.
Mohammed Sadique
Khan. Aged 30, from Dewsbury, a town about
14 kilometres from Leeds. Believed to be
responsible for the explosion in a subway train at
Edgware Road station. He was married to a Muslim
woman from Gujarat in India, whose family had
migrated to South Africa and then to the UK. He
met her while the two were students at Leeds
University.
Hasib Hussain.
Aged 19, also from Leeds. Believed to have blown
himself up on the number 30 double-decker bus near
Tavistock Square. According to The Times, he had
gone "a bit wild" as a young teenager, but had
become devoutly religious about 18 months ago
after returning from a trip to Pakistan to visit
his relatives. He lived with his Pakistani-born
factory-worker parents. He studied at the Matthew
Murray High School and never went to university.
Questions are already being asked whether
any of these suspects had previously come to the
notice of the British police. There is some
confusion. British Home Secretary Charles Clarke
strongly denied a reported statement by French
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that he (Clarke)
had told a Europran Union counter-terrorism
meeting on July 13 that some of the bombers had
been arrested last year by British police.
Following this denial, Sarkozy clarified
that he did not say that Clarke had said this, but
he had only said that he (Sarkozy) had heard that
some of them had been arrested last year.
According to the BBC, Shehzad Tanweer was arrested
by the local police in 2004 for disorderly conduct
and cautioned. Hasib Hussain, reportedly a good
friend of Shehzad Tanweer, was arrested in 2004
for shoplifting and released after a caution.
After the naming of the three above, a
fourth suspect was named: Jamaican-born Lindsey
Germaine, who lived in Buckinghamshire.
Shadows of Daniel Pearl
This
development recalls the case of Daniel Pearl, the
American Wall Street Journal reporter who was
kidnapped and then killed by members of the HUM
and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) in
January-February, 2002.
Pearl's murder was
orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British citizen of
Pakistani origin who had studied at the London
School of Economics before joining the HUA to go
to Bosnia.
Omar then infiltrated into
India and participated in some acts of terrorism,
for which he was arrested and jailed by Indian
authorities. In December 1999 he was released in a
deal following the hijacking of an Indian Airlines
plane to Afghainstan by the HUM. From Kandahar,
Omar crossed to Pakistan, joined al-Qaeda and
opened its office in Lahore.
In the
beginning of 2002, meanwhile, Pearl had heard that
the instructions to Richard Reid, the so-called
shoe bomber, whose father was a British resident
of Caribbean origin, to carry out his terrorist
strike had come from an unidentified source in
Karachi belonging to an organization called the
Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), based in Lahore. Its
leader, Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, had four wives,
two of them African-Americans.
The JUF
differed from other Pakistani jihadi organizations
in some respects. It focused its activities on
Muslim communities in the US, Canada and the
Caribbean and its membership consisted largely of
blacks recruited in the US, Canada and the
Caribbean. It laid emphasis on the need to
penetrate the armed forces of the US and the
Caribbean by recruiting blacks serving in them. It
was a highly secretive organization and not much
was known about its leaders other than Gilani. It
never issued any statements and never circulated
any pamphlets or ran any websites.
It
became a jihadi organization of major concern to
the intelligence agencies of the US and Canada
after its members in the US were involved in a
series of attacks on Hindu and Jewish targets and
its supporters in the armed forces of the
Caribbean almost successfully staged a coup to
captured power in the late 1980s.
In 1995,
the HUA also started focusing on the black
community in the US. It recruited nearly a dozen
blacks there and brought them to Pakistan for
jihadi training in its camps, and sent them back
to the US. While the HUA and the JUF kept away
from each other in Pakistan, they cooperated in
the US and built up a network of sleeper cells.
The HUA did not show much interest in the
Caribbean and left that area to the JUF.
While it has been established that the HUM
and the HUJI had a leading role in the kidnapping
and murder of Pearl, it is not clear whether the
JUF had any role. Omar has been sentenced to death
by a lower court but an appeal is pending in a
higher court. On July 14, the hearing was
adjourned for the 32nd time.
Reports from
Pakistan indicate that Omar continues to be active
from jail, reportedly keeping in touch with
friends and followers in the UK. Statements
purported to have been issued by him from jail
calling on the Muslims of the world to retaliate
against the US for descecration of the Holy Koran
are disseminated every Friday in many Pakistani
mosques controlled by jihadi organizations.
In the meanwhile, unhindered by Pakistani
authorities, the JUF continues to recruit
volunteers from the US and the Caribbean, take
them to Pakistan and train them in its camps
before they are returned to their places of
origin.
On June 20, 2003, before the
arrival of Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf in the US for his Camp David meeting
with President George W Bush, Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) officials disclosed that they
had arrested one Lyman Faris, also known as
Mohammad Rauf, originally a resident of
Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. He had migrated to the
US in 1994 and was working as a truck driver in
Ohio before being arrested and charged with having
links to al-Qaeda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, said
to be Osama bin Laden's operations chief, who is
believed to have coordinated the September 11,
2001 attacks.
According to FBI officials,
as quoted in the US media, Faris visited
Afghanistan and Pakistan a number of times between
2000 and 2002, met bin Laden and worked with
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in organizing and financing
jihad causes. After returning to the US from
Pakistan in late 2002, officials said, he began
examining the Brooklyn Bridge and discussing via
coded messages with al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan
ways of using blow torches to sever its suspension
cables. He is also believed to have been
associated in the past with the JUF.
Reports on the investigation into the
London blasts so far point the finger of suspicion
at the Kashmir separatist group Lashkar-e-Toiba
(LET) and the JUF (many Pakistanis who have
migrated to the UK are Punjabi-speaking Mirpuris
from Pakistan-administered Kashmir). Pakistani
sources say that while Shehzad Tanweer, one of the
suspected bombers, was trained in two LET camps at
Muridke, near Lahore, and in Karachi, Lindsey
Germaine had a history of association with the
JUF.
B Raman is additional
secretary (retired), cabinet secretariat,
government of India, New Delhi, and, presently,
director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai
and distinguished fellow and convener, Observer
Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter. Email:
itschen36@gmail.com
(Copyright 2005 B
Raman) |
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