personally, he wasn't capable of it

Bashir Ahmed, centre, the uncle of 22-year-old bombing suspect Shehzad Tanweer, talks to the media in Leeds yesterday. (Ian Hodgson, Reuters photo)

Chip shop guy 'was nice': 'Who pushed him to it?' uncle of Leeds bomber wonders

National Post

Thursday, July 14, 2005

By Matthew Fisher

LEEDS, England - A few months ago Shehzad Tanweer was telling lots of jokes, driving his father's Mercedes and wearing a blue apron while serving famously generous portions of fish and chips to customers in the family-run takeaway.

Only two weeks ago the 22-year-old sports science student was indulging his passion for cricket by playing with old friends on a neighbourhood pitch.

Last Thursday, Mr. Tanweer broke with his very ordinary life in the most shocking way imaginable. Joining at least three other Muslims of Pakistani descent who were also born and raised in West Yorkshire, he travelled to London to become a foot soldier, a bomb strapped to his back, in Osama bin Laden's war against the West.

After barely saying goodbye to each other at King's Cross Station, according to police who have studied closed-circuit videos taken that morning, the four men went their separate ways. Minutes later they set off their bombs, killing themselves and more than 50 other people and maiming another 700.

The suicide attacks not only shattered lives in the heart of London. They broke the spirit of Leeds' large South Asian community, whose members first began arriving here half a century ago to work in the area's textile mills.

"Himself personally, he wasn't capable of it," Mr. Tanweer's weary uncle Bashir Ahmed told an impromptu street-side news conference attended by some of the hundreds of journalists yesterday scouring the nondescript red-brick Victorian terrace houses of Beeston Hill for information about the bombers.

"Who pushed him to it? I don't know. I wish I could find it out," Mr. Ahmed said before declaring such was the family's disgrace and fear of retribution they would probably leave a place that had been their home for decades.

"I still can't believe it. That guy from the chip shop, he was really nice," said Yaser Majid, 29, who was getting his hair cut at a Pakistani barber shop a two-minute walk from where Mr. Tanweer and another of the Leeds bombers grew up.

Although reluctant to acknowledge exactly how well he knew Mr. Tanweer, Mr. Majid described the family as "joe blokes," or ordinary people.

"I didn't know that he was a fundamentalist or a guy with a screw loose," he said of his friend, who killed himself and six others in an Underground train near Liverpool Street station.

"That is what makes this even scarier for me. How can we defend ourselves against suicide bombers? They can be anybody."

Before last week's attacks, British intelligence officials had often said as many as 3,000 British Muslims had attended religious schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they had received paramilitary training. Mr. Ahmed confirmed yesterday his nephew had spent last winter doing just that at a madrassa in Pakistan.

Mr. Majid did not know about that trip, which may have been taken with some of the other Leeds bombers, but he said his experience in his own neighbourhood told him that whatever compelled Mr. Tanweer to become a murderer in the name of his religion, it had not happened in the nearby mosque they both sometimes attended.

"It had to have been someone from outside who trained him," Mr. Majid said, although he acknowledged some Muslims in Leeds follow Wahhabism, an extreme, puritanical interpretation of Islam exported from Saudi Arabia by, among others, bin Laden and his al-Qaeda followers.

Although Muslims in Leeds said they had no idea how suicide bombers could have grown up among them, it took about a minute to get them to provide a long list of grievances. The first complaint was always about the high unemployment rate among Muslim youth.

Cool Britannia is a brilliant slogan that may be apt in many parts of London, but it has nothing to do with Beeston.

Although Mr. Tanweer's family was unusually well off and lived in two houses with the wall between them knocked down, the part of Leeds they call home is a crowded suburb with boarded-up houses and dirty back alleys. Here Asians coexist uneasily with down-at-heel whites who seemed content yesterday to nurse beers on their front stoops while watching the passing media frenzy.

Two policemen who regularly patrol Beeston said there are parts of Leeds where racial tensions are worse, but there is plenty to keep them busy here, too. For reasons that were never explained to them, they said they had been asked two months ago to undertake more foot patrols and establish a more visible presence.

"I am hoping that there won't be any more trouble, but there may be," said Ahmed Rashid, a 50-year-old father of five and one of the city's many Asian cab drivers.

"The old generation came here from Pakistan to work and that is all we have ever done. The young ones feel more uncomfortable because they want the full rights that the British have and they don't get them. If those kids get into the wrong company -- and these bombers must have -- there can be real trouble."

There was a sense, several Muslim elders in Leeds said, that their community had become more politicized after the Bosnian war, with its massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica. Conflicts in the West Bank, Gaza, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq had also caused real anger. And there was universal fury at the hatred shown toward Muslims in recent years by several openly racist British political parties.

"What 19- or 20-year-old would be prepared to give up his life? This is not something easy to do. You must look at the root causes, such as how disadvantaged this area is," said Pervez Akhtar, a 40-year-old environmental worker whose father spent three years as a British Indian Army prisoner of war in Japan before emigrating to Britain.

"Instead of doing this, what the government wants to do is bring in legislation to try and control Muslims. A criminal is not a Pakistani or a Muslim. He is simply a criminal."

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Anti-terror event part of planning for 2010: Winter Olympics could be a target

The National Post

Thursday, July 14, 2005

By Mohammed Adam

TORONTO -- Canada, the United States and Mexico will hold a major anti-terrorist exercise as part of security preparations for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, a senior U.S. diplomat revealed Wednesday.

John Dickson, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, said the decision was taken by the leaders of the three countries at their recent meeting because the Winter Games could be a terrorist target.

"This is the major thing that will be happening in North America in the year 2010. This is a world stage and terrorists like world stages," he told the Ottawa Citizen after speaking to a Toronto disaster management conference. "It was decided by the three leaders that this will be one event that should be exercised in advance to help prepare."

Preparations are being done by the appropriate agencies and Dickson said he doesn't know when the exercise will take place. The Olympic Games, which bring together thousands of athletes around the world, are always a magnet for terrorists.

The last time terrorists staged a major attack on Olympic athletes was at the Munich Games in 1972. Palestinian terrorists, who were demanding the release of more than 200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, killed two Israeli athletes. Nine more Israeli athletes died when the terrorists engaged in a gun battle with German authorities.

At the Atlanta Games in 1996, a pipe bomb planted by a home-grown terrorist in Olympic Centennial Park in the heart of the city killed one person and wounded 111 others.

Even though successive Games have gone on peacefully, experts say security agencies can't take anything for granted, especially in the wake of a string of terrorist attacks stretching from 9/11 to Madrid to London.

Earlier this week, Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan warned Canadians to shake themselves out of complacency and recognize that Canada is not immune to terrorism. She said what happened in London could happen here.

Dickson said the clarion call today is "relentless preparation" and "people are going to do everything to make sure the [Canadian] event takes place and takes place comfortably and confidently."

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