Leeds, England – They gathered just down the road from Shahzad Tanweer’s house Wednesday, the spiritual and political leaders of the downtrodden little community of Beeston, to assure residents that there are no terrorists living among them.
“We’ve never come across any radical element whatsoever,” said Hanif Malik, manager of a community center, echoing what the Muslim councilman, the Anglican bishop, a Methodist minister and others had to say.
They were talking almost in sight of Tanweer’s house, which is still taped off from this week’s police raid to determine why he might have blown himself up last week inside London’s Aldgate Road subway station.
Just one block away from where the ministers and councilmen offered their reassurances, people living in the slate-and- brick row houses whispered their disagreement.
You can find anger and depression and radicalism in Britain wherever you find poverty and racial and religious tension, they said.
So it’s little wonder police have found a bomber in Beeston.
“If they think like that, then they will see more of this, more attacks,” said Asad Qayyum, a 53-year-old insurance adjuster who immigrated to the area from Pakistan.
“If you had come to me before and asked if there was a terrorist sleeper cell here in Beeston, you know, I’d have to have said, ‘Yeah, it’s certainly possible,”‘ said Jonathan Hawkins, an unemployed computer technician who was smoking and watching the TV cameras outside his home. “People around here feel like they’ve been done wrong.”
The sentiments in Beeston were starkly different Wednesday from those around much of Britain, which was still coming to terms with the discovery that last week’s bombings in London appear to have been carried out by men who were born and raised in England.
British officials said Wednesday that the four suspects, each of whom is believed to have died in one of the four explosions, all lived in the West Yorkshire area of England, in and around Leeds.
They were “cleanskins” with no arrest records, officials said, denying French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy’s claim that some of the suspects had been detained in 2004 but released in the hope that they would lead police to a larger radical network.
The fact that the suspects were British points to bigger worries for the country: Their decision to carry bombs suggests a troublesome socio-economic imbalance and also fertile ground for nurturing extremists.
“This is not an isolated criminal act we are dealing with,” Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament on Wednesday. “It is an extreme and evil ideology whose roots lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of the religion of Islam.”
“I think what’s really a bad sign is that, to me, the fact the bombers were homegrown shows that the recruiting is becoming easier,” said Johnathan Stevenson, senior fellow for counterterrorism at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C. “A whole pool of people who may not have done something like this in the past is now energized.”
Authorities have identified two other suspects: Mohammed Sadique Khan, 30, and Hasib Hussain, 18. Such is the surprise at the bombers’ English heritage that local newspapers Wednesday published copies of Tanweer’s birth certificate, showing he was born Dec. 15, 1982, in the neighboring city of Bradford.
Yet in the community of Beeston – where Tanweer’s father runs a small fish-and-chips shop, and where teenagers on the street say they never knew Tanweer to care about anything but cricket – residents who didn’t know the suspect are not so surprised at their community’s new renown.
Qayyum sat in a barbershop with other Muslims, drinking tea and pondering the community’s new place in the spotlight, and said he would not be shocked to find a bomber in his midst.
“If you go ask the ordinary people, they will tell you there are these elements, these extremists elements,” he said. “You see it every day.”
