'Why' was the question on everyone's lips this week as details of western Europe's first suicide bombing emerged. Most baffled was the long-established Muslim community where the bombers grew up. Joe Humphreys reports from Leeds
The street on which Hasib Hussain once played as a carefree child was quiet yesterday. A policeman stood guard at the gate of his family home, a line of security tape flapping in the breeze behind him. It was in this house last Thursday week Maniza Hussain sat fretting over her 18-year-old old son who hadn't returned home from a trip to London.
Hasib had told her that morning that he was going to the city for a religious convention with friends, but it was now after 10pm and his mother was getting increasingly anxious.
Hasib had a history of disappointing her. The burly teenager had flunked his GCSEs and had been unsuccessful in his efforts to find a job. For a while he had gone what his neighbours described as "wild", rebelling, it seemed, against his over-achieving older brother, Imran. But then he took a short trip to Pakistan, from where his father had moved to Leeds more than 20 years ago, and from where he returned a changed young man.
He stopped drinking and swearing. He traded in his tracksuits for a flowing Muslim gown. He began growing a beard and going to the local mosque more regularly. His parents were concerned about his apparent inability to make friends, but they believed he was changing for the better.
As the night closed in on the day some Britons are calling "7/7", Maniza Hussain eventually reached for the phone. The trusting, innocent mother had been watching the footage from London all day, the carnage and the mounting death-toll. It seemed impossible that her son had got caught up in the blasts. Yet she rang the police, just in case.
On Tuesday, she got an answer she could never have expected when armed officers, flanked by members of the Army Bomb Disposal Unit, came knocking at her door in Holbeck, a run-down estate in the southern suburbs of Leeds. Three other homes nearby were raided in the operation, which had been prompted by Maniza's phone call and the information that she had given about her missing son.
Two days ago she got final confirmation of what she had begun to dread: a grainy CCTV camera still showed her son at Luton Station with a backpack containing 10lb of explosives. It is the last picture Maniza has of him.
Exactly 81 minutes after his appearance on CCTV, Maniza's son detonated the bomb on board the number 30 bus in Tavistock Square, taking with him 12 other lives.
Since the police raids began, locals have been keeping a vigil of sorts in Holbeck and neighbouring Beeston, where a second suicide bomber, Shehzad Tanweer (22) - a rare friend of Hasib's - lived. In the chequered maze of back-to-back redbrick homes, clusters of disbelieving residents gathered at street corners to exchange news and mourn the death of their community as they knew it. Amid the whispered conversations was an Irish accent, belonging to Zunaid Karim, a Dublin-born NHS consultant and an administrator at the Leeds Grand Mosque.
Seven years ago he moved from Rathfarnham in Dublin to the multicultural haven of Leeds - and he has never looked back. He loves the city, loves the diversity, loves what he describes as the "terrific inter-faith relations". Now he fears it could all be pulled asunder.
"Local people are devastated, and they are nervous of external influences coming in because they have been living together peacefully for so long," he says. "These were regular young lads. They were not different. They were not extremist, or radicals. They were not seen standing outside the mosque saying 'we must have jihad', like you might see young guys do in London."
Indeed, that is what has puzzled locals most about the discoveries this week. Leeds is a hotbed of moderate Islam. People here say they only know of Islamic extremism from the newspapers; they expected the bombers to be from "down south". Karim confides: "There are idiots in all communities. But radical Muslims? We don't know about them in Leeds."
WHILE THE POLICE raids began early on Tuesday, they continued all week as the search for explosives and accomplices to the bombers widened across the city. Each day, families clutching bags of belongings could be seen scuttling breathlessly along the narrow streets, passing troops of police and bomb-disposal experts en route to their evacuated homes.
The speechlessness of many locals said it all. Britain had woken up this week to an unspeakable truth. Police confirmed that it was the first country in western Europe to be hit by suicide bombers.
More shocking still, the bombers were "home-grown". Their birth certificates showed it: Hasib Hussain was born in Leeds General Hospital, Shehzad Tanweer in St Luke's, Bradford. A third named suspect, Mohammad Sidique Khan, was born in St James's, Leeds. Disturbingly, none had ever before come to the attention of the police or, seemingly, the local community. They were what MI5 called "lilywhites", ordinary folk recruited to act as collateral damage in a terrorist attack.
They were more than that, however. They were pictures of ordinariness, whose mild-mannered faces stared out from school annuals and wedding snaps. Hussain was labelled in the press a "teenager, shoplifter and aimless youth", Tanweer a "graduate, sporty yob and trophy-rich athlete".
The third, 30-year-old Khan, who was married with a child and a second on the way, was described as "the teacher and mentor to the young and vulnerable", and also, more pointedly, in one newspaper headline, as the "killer in the classroom".
"Why?" is the question on everyone's lips.
"Everyone has their own theory," says Karim. "It's maybe not the time to talk about it, but there are issues which have made the young in general disillusioned. Young people are only seeing the negatives, negatives in their own communities and negatives around the world. They see things as unfair. Against that background, people are winding them up and setting them off."
Local factors can't be discounted from consideration. Leeds in general and Beeston in particular are by no means poor, but they contain pockets of deprivation. On several streets near the family homes of Hussain and Tanweer you can find boarded-up houses and other signs of decay. One of the landmark buildings in the area is a battered corner-shack that serves as a massage parlour.
But there is also plenty of regeneration and community spirit. Around the corner from Tanweer's family home is the headquarters of Faith Together, an inter-religious group set up in 1997 to combat disadvantage.
"It's very successful. People are now describing this as a normal area," says the group's secretary, Rev Neil Bishop, proudly.
Among the services provided, and availed of by Tanweer and Hussain, are computer training and sports. Under the scheme, single mothers, some of them asylum seekers, leave their children with the Methodist ministry while studying English at the Muslim-owned training centre across the street.
Almost 16 per cent of the population of Beeston is Muslim and just 1.3 per cent is Sikh, according to census figures. Yet 90 per cent of the streetscape is Asian. Flowing Indian dresses decorate many clothes lines. Colour and industriousness abound. At corner shops, among them a takeaway run by Tanweer's father, old men in plain Muslim gowns can be seen scolding their young offspring for loitering. The latter, mostly attired in the latest city fashions, skip back to their studies or off to work, if they have any.
The unemployment rate in Beeston is almost 8 per cent, more than double the average for Leeds. Some local youngsters have turned to crime, an unheard-of development for Asians a generation ago. The city council claims that crime is falling in Beeston and Holbeck, but to local Labour party councillor Mohammed Rafique, thepicture is not so rosy.
"There is now violent crime as well as petty crime. That is a concern," he says. "Ten years ago crime among Asians was very low. But now they are getting used to drugs and crime. There are other problems too. People are leaving school without an education and they are having trouble getting a job.
"You have to look at the wider picture to see why these kids did what they did. There is a generation gap. Parents don't have the relationship with the young of today that they did when I was growing up. That too is a factor."
Politicians have often spoken with fear of this "generation gap", of British-born Asians mocking the reverence that their fathers have had towards a state which has given them refuge and employment over the past 50 years. However, in Beeston, the issue is being played down.
"Yes, the young people don't realise how good they have it," says one local father. "But, in that, they are no different to young people anywhere."
A MORE WORRYING gap which people talk about is that between the values of Asians who moved to Britain decades ago and their peers in their home countries. A rite of passage for many British Muslims, Hussain and Tanweer, among them, is a trip to Pakistan to study the Koran. There, young British Pakistanis sometimes find themselves encountering imams who rail not just against western society but against people such as their parents who assimilate it.
In Tanweer's case the trip to Lahore late last year was cut short. The talented but modest young man, who was said to have been too shy to look customers in the eye when serving them in his father's fish-and-chip shop, told his parents that he didn't like the religious college and that he didn't get on with the people in Pakistan. But, as with Hussain, the visit changed him. He started going to the mosque more regularly, and frequented the Hamara community centre, where he met other young Muslims to discuss religion and politics.
"His parents were very proud of him," his uncle, Bashir Ahmed, says. "They were very pleased he was taking his religious studies seriously when many parents are worried about their children going to the pub."
With hindsight, Ahmed can see that his nephew must have come under the spell of extremists around the time of his visit to Pakistan. Some local people claim Tanweer and Hussain had been thrown out of the local mosque for expressing extremist views. It is claimed they moved, along with some other local radicals, to the Hamara centre, where they apparently met Khan.
The centre remained sealed off by police yesterday as the search continued for those who funded and organised the attacks.
Among those whom police had been seeking was Magdi Mahmoud al-Nashar (33) a biochemistry graduate from Leeds University. Suspicious materials, which police believe may have been part of a "bomb factory", were found in his student flat in the north-west of the city. The Egyptian, who had told neighbours that he had recently unsuccessfully applied for a job at a Dublin university, was arrested yesterday in Cairo. He has denied any role in the bombings.
Many Muslims admit that they have been complacent about extremist voices in their midst.
"We are not getting enough scholars speaking out," says Karim. "They are saying it in the mosques all right - they are saying that people who spread violence and hatred are quoting the Koran out of context - but they are not saying it outside the mosques. They are not saying it in the community."
Attention has focused sharply on imported imams, brought into England from isolated villages in Pakistan to fill vacancies at city mosques. Faisal Motashar, an Iraqi father of two, who moved to Leeds 17 years ago, is angry about what some such imams are preaching in the name of Islam.
"Those imams do not appreciate the values of western countries because they don't realise how harmonious and peaceful relations are here. Those people from abroad have been taught the wrong way. They forget about the principles of Islam."
The Catholic Bishop of Leeds, Arthur Roche, is slower to criticise his Muslim counterparts.
"I don't think it's true that imams are not speaking out against terrorism," he says. "It is not true for the Muslim leaders in this city, because they have put out a very strong condemnatory statement. They are deeply shocked - they are shattered, in fact - that some of their own people are embroiled in this poisonous ideological crusade."
Roche, whose paternal grandfather came from Galway, led hundreds of people in two minutes' silent prayer this week in Leeds's Millennium Square - opposite the hospital where Hussain was born - for the victims of the London bombings. Like many city natives, he fears the effect this week's discoveries will have on community relations.
"Leeds has been a success story in terms of the integration of people, and I believe that success story will continue," he says. "But we do have to be vigilant and work for greater harmony. It was not very long ago that my Catholic community and the Irish community were in a similar situation with the IRA bombings on the mainland. People were stigmatised because of the community they came from, or because they were seen to be IRA sympathisers. There was open hostility. You would get verbal abuse from people for being Irish. We have to avoid that sort of stigmatisation again."
The bishop spoke with as much hope as confidence. He knows, like everyone else in Britain, that race relations in his country are facing their biggest challenge of modern times. There is fear everywhere: fear that more fanatics are out there; fear that heavy-handed police tactics might provide an environment for more radicalism to breed; fear that tensions may soon boil over.
FRESH IN PEOPLE'S memories are the riots of four years ago, triggered in a north-eastern suburb of Leeds by the arrest of an Asian man. Members of the British National Party were seen canvassing around the city this week, trying to make political capital out of the bombings. Asian community leaders, meanwhile, launched their own offensive, handing out leaflets at mosques reminding Muslims of their obligation to co-operate with the police. Police have also intercepted Internet plotting between right-wing xenophobes and football hooligans planning possible "revenge" attacks on Muslims.
Karim is conscious of people in Ireland observing events, and admits that some people might feel that what is going on in Leeds is an argument against creating multicultural societies elsewhere. But, he says, "I don't think the Irish should point fingers. You had a homogenous community and you had the IRA and the UVF".
As "an Irishman" married to a Dubliner, he says, he loves the country of his birth, and its people. But "I'd find it difficult going back to Dublin. I got racism there when I was a kid. It went for a while but it came back again with the Celtic Tiger".
Thinking of his own four children, who "are more mixed-race than me", he adds: "The opportunities for young people are better here [ in Leeds]."
Despite the increased tensions, Karim and many more like him are determined not to let the fanatics win, nor to allow that much-loved experiment in human vitality - multicultural Britain - to be torn apart.
"We are concerned," he said. "But the links between people are too strong to be broken."