On a warm April morning in 2004, I travelled out to Whitechapel in the East End of London to meet a young Englishman named Sulayman Keeler (formerly Simon Keeler) who was a recent convert to Islam. He was stocky with sharp eyes and a sparse, sandy beard, and was a leading member of the radical Islamist political group al-Muhajiroun, which translates from Arabic as ‘the emigrants’. It was a group with a defined manifesto: fierce opposition to British foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the creation of a global Islamic state ruled by a caliph, and Islamic revolution in Britain, with the black flag of Islam being hoisted over 10 Downing Street.

Keeler and I sat and talked in a McDonald’s for an hour about his beliefs and what had led to his conversion to Islam. ‘It’s like diving off the biggest diving board into the unknown,’ he said. ‘It’s a complete shift from what I used to be. Before, I believed in democracy, freedom, and it was all about doing what I liked and making the most out of this life, enjoyment of it to the max, whereas when I embraced Islam all of that changed.’

He had grown up in the quiet Sussex town of Crawley. He was intelligent and articulate and spoke fluently, if rather predictably, about what he considered to be the decadence of Western society and about the atrocities he said had been perpetrated by Western states against Muslims across the world. For him, Islam was at war with the secular world. ‘I don’t believe in democracy,’ he said. ‘It’s man-made. You’re talking about a government that taxes the people to death. It oppresses many millions of people in the world. It wouldn’t be such a shame to have them overturned.’

I had first begun to investigate al-Muhajiroun in the summer of 2001, shortly before the September 11 attacks in America. But my interest in the group had been rekindled by my experience of reporting in Iraq for BBC Newsnight in 2003. There I had witnessed the swift humiliation of Saddam Hussein’s forces in Basra and had investigated his regime’s torture and murder of shi’a Muslims in the south of the country. Not a single Muslim I interviewed then expressed any regret about the fall of Saddam, yet during the months after my return to Britain, political Islamists from al-Muhajiroun had begun to use Britain’s intervention in Iraq as a potent recruiting tool.

A couple of days after our meeting, I called Keeler to see if he would be interviewed for a film I was planning to make about al-Muhajiroun for the BBC. He asked me to meet him the following week at the Weavers’ Fields community hall in Bethnal Green, east London. On arriving there I saw Keeler, sitting halfway back in a crowded room, with his young son next to him. The boy looked no more than five years old. At the very back, isolated from the men, was a small group of women, dressed in full-length niqabs; only their eyes were exposed.

‘Today’s topic, brothers, is knowledge,’ announced the man with the microphone, standing at the front of the small hall. This was Abu Uzair, whose real name is Sajid Sharif; like many Islamist radicals he uses a nom de guerre taken from the Qur’an. The thirty-nine-year- old engineering graduate from Manchester continued: ‘Look to capitalism, it has only existed for seventy-five years and it’s crumbling already. Communism is finished. The only other ideological belief around now, not a religion, Islam is not a religion… Let’s make it clear: it’s a political, ideological belief.’

Two video cameras on tripods were recording the speeches that night. A second man at the front, dressed in a long, white juba robe, took the microphone.

‘When Tony Blair came out, George Bush came out at the same time and he said, “You’re either with us or you’re with the… terrorists.” And what did we Muslims say?’

He paused for effect.

‘We said, “We’re not with you, we’re with the…terrorists!”’

The crowd finished his sentence for him and cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is great’) reverberated around the hall.

After breaking for prayers, Abu Uzair took the microphone once again.

‘When they speak about September 11, when the two planes magnificently run through those buildings, people turn around and say, “Hang on a second, that is barbaric. Why did you have to do that?” You know why? Because of ignorance.’

At this point, I stood up and interrupted.

‘You describe the 9/11 attacks, planes flying into the twin towers, and said it was magnificent, how can you justify that whether you’re a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew?’

‘For us it’s retaliation,’ Abu Uzair replied. ‘Islam is not the starter of wars. If you start the war we won’t turn the other cheek.’

‘But the killing of innocent civilians can’t be right?’

‘It can’t be right according to you,’ he said, jabbing his finger at me. ‘According to you, it can’t be right. According to Islam, it’s right. When you talk about innocent civilians, do you not kill innocent civilians in Iraq? Do you not kill innocent civilians indiscriminately in Afghanistan?’

‘I wouldn’t describe that as “magnificent”,’ I said.

‘Islamically speaking, it’s magnificent. I don’t believe in democracy. From my perspective, it’s a magnificent day in history because it changed history.’

After the meeting ended, I asked Keeler whether he agreed that the September 11 attacks had been magnificent. ‘You talk about 3,000 so-called innocents,’ he said. ‘What about the 200,000 innocents in Afghanistan? What about the one million children in Iraq who died as a result of America’s foreign policy? Let’s remember who we’re talking about. You’re crying about the fact that America, the oppressor, has been punched in the nose. That’s what happened. You’re talking about one man, Tony Blair, who sends a bunch of aircraft into Iraq, bombs a bunch of people. You’re talking about another man, Osama bin Laden, who sends a bunch of aeroplanes into America and bombs a bunch of people – what is the difference? You tell me.’

The more time I spent with Keeler, the more I began to hear echoes of the anti-Western, revolutionary rhetoric preached by his mentor and leader, Omar Bakri Mohammed, the Islamist cleric who led al-Muhajiroun and has inspired many hundreds of young men to embrace radical Islam in Britain. He used to be dismissed as a fool and a crank by many in the British security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. But a large number of his recruits have received terrorist training in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and some have gone on to plan and carry out terrorist attacks. A week before my meeting with Keeler, officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorism Branch had arrested nine men in connection with a plot to blow up bars, nightclubs and the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, England. The joint police and security service investigation had been code-named ‘Operation Crevice’ and it was the most complex counterterrorism investigation ever undertaken in Britain at that time. Half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which can be used to make truck and car bombs, had been recovered from a lock-up in west London. The leader of the plot and two of his conspirators were, like Keeler, from Crawley, and had links with al-Muhajiroun and its leader.

Omar Bakri Mohammed was preaching hate in Britain for more than twenty years, unencumbered by the state. A hard core of extremist radicals joined him, infecting generations of young British Muslims with their nihilistic interpretation of Islam. Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5 and the head of its counterterrorism since the September 11 attacks, has warned that the work of intelligence agencies alone will not be sufficient to defeat terrorism in Britain. He has concluded that, ‘the violence directed against us is the product of a much wider extremist ideology, whose basic tenets are inimical to the tolerance and liberty which form the basis of our democracy’. But MI5’s warning about the dangers posed by extremist ideology has come too late. Western democracies have been disastrously slow to recognize where the true battle lines were drawn. Back in the 1990s, the radicals preaching in London and other British cities, and the networks they were creating, were judged largely as a threat not to Britain but to countries overseas. An MI5 source told me that the service ‘was just becoming aware of a significant acceleration in extremist Islamist activity’ as late as 2003. By then, hundreds of British extremists had received terrorist training abroad and some were planning attacks on home soil. This was a ‘failure of imagination’ by the government and security services, says Sir Paul Lever, who used to chair the Joint Intelligence Committee. Another source responsible for synthesizing reports for the government told me that it was ‘a massive intelligence failure’ and that MI5 had been ‘hugely complacent’ about the threat from Islamists.

The complacency within the British establishment, in both the government and MI5, was shattered in London on the morning of July 7, 2005 when four young British Muslims murdered fifty-two of their fellow citizens. Since then huge resources have been diverted to MI5 in an effort to catch up with the scale of the threat. But much of the British state’s response to the accelerating terror threat at home has concentrated on peripheral measures: robust counterterrorism laws; court orders against journalists, who are being forced to hand over their research; proposals to detain people without trial, first for ninety days and, most recently, a new law which makes forty-two days’ detention ‘acceptable’ in times of national crisis; increased surveillance with security cameras; the tracking of people’s movements through the use of e-tickets such as the Oyster card on the London Underground. There is a sense that the state’s grip is tightening.

Yet rather than being susceptible to these generalized responses, the terrorist threat posed by Muslim extremists is specific and predictable, with mappable links criss-crossing their way back to the early 1990s, when radical clerics were allowed to settle and work in Britain. If you track the connections, what emerges is how many of the plotters and perpetrators knew each other or were friends. This should make investigating terrorist plots easier than if they were the work of random and disconnected groups, but it also raises an important question: how did we arrive at this state of affairs?

This is the story of the British jihad.

islamism in england

Omar Bakri Mohammed was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958, and was recruited to the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager.

Founded in Egypt in 1928 while the country was under British rule, the Muslim Brotherhood aimed to defeat the powers of colonialism and imperialism by creating unity among Arab states and introducing Islamic law. The Brotherhood was viewed as a major threat by regimes and dictatorships across the Arab world; it was a populist movement which could mobilize huge support and threaten secular nationalist leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt from 1956 to 1970.

In repeated crackdowns, Egyptian secret police detained and tortured hundreds of Brotherhood members, including the movement’s intellectual leader, Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would become Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command. Born in a village in northern Egypt, Qutb’s origins were humble but he was an intelligent child and by the age of ten had learned to recite the Qur’an by rote, a prodigious feat of memory known as attaining hafiz. After university in Cairo and while he was still in his twenties, he published several influential books on the subject of the Islamic revival, the notion that Muslims must return to the pure, simple ways of the Prophet. Much of his philosophy was drawn from medieval Islamic scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah. Qutb believed it was the duty of all Muslims to create an Islamic state governed only by the law of God.

After studying in America for two years, at Stanford University, Colorado State University and a teacher’s college in Washington, DC, Qutb returned to Egypt in 1951, disgusted by what he considered to be the decadence and immorality of Western society. He said that Christian churches were no more than ‘entertainment centres and sexual playgrounds’. He was even more critical of Muslims in his home country and, most trenchantly, of Nasser, whom he condemned for failing to institute sharia law. Consequently, Qutb believed that his fellow Muslims were in jahiliyya, an Islamic concept describing a state of wicked ignorance before the Qur’an was revealed to Mohammed in the seventh century AD, and that Western habits and influences were contaminating their faith. Qutb had no respect for secular Arab nationalism in Egypt or across the wider region. He believed that allegiance to country was in violation of the higher allegiance to God, and he wrote of fealty to the global Muslim community or umma. His revolutionary ideas were embraced by the Brotherhood, which plotted to murder the Egyptian president in the name of Allah. In 1954, the Brotherhood was implicated in a failed attempt on Nasser’s life and the movement was banned. Six suspects were executed and thousands were rounded up and imprisoned, including Qutb, who received a fifteen-year sentence.

Qutb wrote his most celebrated book, Milestones, from his prison cell. This book remains an inspiration to the Sunni jihadists of al-Qaida. ‘Those who say that Islamic Jihaad was merely for the defense of the “homeland of Islam’ diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life,” Qutb wrote, explaining that all systems which stand in the way of the creation of an Islamic state would have to be destroyed. ‘If Islam is again to play the role of the leader of mankind, then it is necessary that the Muslim community be restored to its original form.’

He went on: ‘Islam cannot accept or agree to a situation which is half Islam and half jahiliyya…The mixing and coexistence of the truth and falsehood is impossible. When the above mentioned obstacles and practical difficulties…are put in [Islam’s] way, it has no recourse but to remove them by force.’

These were dangerous words and a direct threat to the secular Egyptian elite. Qutb was executed in Egypt in 1966 for plotting a coup from inside prison, and became a martyr for jihadists across the world. After Qutb’s death, his brother, Mohammed, fled to Saudi Arabia, carrying his books and ideas with him. Osama bin Laden himself is reported to have attended Mohammed Qutb’s lectures in the Kingdom.

Admirers of Sayyid Qutb describe him as an intellectual – a political Islamist, not a terrorist – and argue that his justification for violence must be understood in the context of the repression he experienced in Egypt. But there is a causal link between what he wrote and today’s Islamic terrorists. Qutb combined political aspirations with a desire for a new fundamentalism that would sweep away the colonial influence in Arab lands as well as pan-Arab nationalism and communism in its wake. For Qutb’s followers, such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, there can be no accommodation between the righteous realm of Islam, Dar ul-Islam, and the land of hostility, or Dar ul-Harb. The idea of perpetual war in the name of Allah is fundamental to jihadi ideology and to understanding the motivations of al-Qaida’s leaders in the tribal areas of the north-west frontier of Pakistan and Islamist extremists in cities across Britain.

Following Sayyid Qutb’s execution, the Muslim Brotherhood faced brutal suppression across the Middle East. In Syria, it was banned but continued as an underground movement, its members plotting to overthrow the ruling Ba’ath Party throughout the 1970s. There were sporadic crackdowns and expulsions. In 1977, at the peak of this struggle, Bakri Mohammed, then a nineteen-year-old member of the Brotherhood, was expelled from Syria for his political activities. He fled to Beirut in Lebanon, where he joined another Islamist movement, Hizb ut-Tahrir or ‘the Party of Liberation’. Hizb ut-Tahrir’s central aim was the creation of a single Islamic state in the Middle East – the khilafah or caliphate. Supporters mourn the year 1923, when Turkey’s secular government, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, overthrew the last caliph, who ruled the Ottoman Empire.

After two years in Lebanon, Bakri Mohammed travelled to Cairo, where he says he attended one of the world’s most ancient universities, al-Azhar. He later told an Australian academic researcher that he was in conflict with his teachers there and soon left for Saudi Arabia to enrol at the Islamic School of al-Saltiyah in Mecca. Hizb ut-Tahrir was banned in Saudi Arabia, as it was in most countries in the Middle East, so Bakri Mohammed launched a new group in Jiddah on March 3, 1983 – the sixtieth anniversary of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He called this group Jamaat al-Muhajiroun, the ‘community of the emigrants’, a reference to the followers of Mohammed in the Qur’an known as the Sahaba. The Saudi authorities soon suspected him of plotting against the ruling House of Sa’ud, which Bakri Mohammed regarded as kufr, or being without faith. His house was raided in March 1985 and the police found a proscribed book written by one of the leaders of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Bakri Mohammed says he was imprisoned and tortured before being expelled once more. He arrived in Britain as a political refugee on March 14, 1986. He cared nothing for Western democracy or for the country that had given him refuge; his first move, after settling in London, was to establish a UK branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group with an established international network and reputation. He then began an aggressive recruitment campaign among the Muslim young of Britain.

Bakri Mohammed was a charismatic polemicist; in lectures and at meetings during the early 1990s he was even said to have called for the assassination of the then British prime minister, John Major, and later for the black flag of Islam to be hoisted over 10 Downing Street. Why was he permitted to continue preaching and agitating for violence against the British state?

The security services hugely underestimated the threat posed by political Islam within Britain. The rise of Islamic extremism in Algeria during the 1980s and early 1990s was monitored but considered an overseas phenomenon – the domain of MI6, not MI5, which concentrates on homeland security. As for Bakri Mohammed, he was dismissed as an eccentric buffoon, and yet even then, in the mid-1990s, long before the attacks of September 11 and the London bombings of July 7, he was engaged in creating a network of extremists and terrorist sympathizers among alienated British-born Muslims.

In some ways Bakri Mohammed faced greater opposition from within Hizb ut-Tahrir than from the British state; the group’s powerful international leaders considered his work to be a distraction from their main objective: an Islamic revolution in the Middle East. ‘Bakri didn’t believe theologically in restricting the khilafah to the Arab countries of the Middle East: he wanted the khilafah in Britain,’ says Rashad Ali, who, in 1994, as a fourteen-year-old in Sheffield, had fallen under the influence of Hizb ut-Tahrir after one of their members was invited to lecture at his school, Abbeydale Grange. Within a year of that lecture, Ali was a fully signed-up member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, organizing events for the party. He finally left after twelve years at the heart of the organization, and has since joined a number of senior defectors who have publicly criticized Hizb ut-Tahrir for secretly supporting the use of political violence to establish a global Islamic state. Hizb ut-Tahrir, however, denies this and claims to be a peaceful, political movement.

The conflict between Bakri Mohammed and the international leadership of Hizb ut-Tahrir led to his eventual expulsion from the group in January 1996. Cast adrift once again, Bakri Mohammed and his closest followers set up al-Muhajiroun, in imitation of the small group he had founded in Saudi Arabia thirteen years earlier. The intention was to use al-Muhajiroun to recruit young ideologues committed to forming a caliphate in Britain. The timing was fortuitous. The civil war in the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia was creating the circumstances for the radicalization of a generation of young British Muslims who were disturbed by the suffering of their fellow Muslims in Bosnia.

the bosnian jihad

Takbir!’ shouts a bearded fighter, brandishing an AK-47 automatic assault rifle in the air, encouraging the small army of several thousand Muslim fighters gathered around him to reply.

‘Allahu Akbar!’ they shout in response.

The grainy video clips of Arab volunteer fighters gathering in Bosnia to confront the Serb opponents can still be found on the Internet today. For the price of a coach ticket, young British Muslims were able to travel to the Balkans to fight alongside these Arab volunteers, the mujahedin, who had arrived from Muslim lands in the early 1990s to support the Bosnian Muslim army as much as they could in its war against the Serbs. Hundreds of British Muslims joined the caravan. One such volunteer was Andrew Rowe, a Londoner with Jamaican parents who had converted to Islam at the age of nineteen. In July 1995 he was wounded by shrapnel when the convoy he was travelling in was attacked. He returned to England, his Bosnian adventure over. British Muslims such as Rowe, who had come back from fighting with the mujahedin, were received with respect in the radical Muslim community in Britain. From his base in London, Rowe continued to pursue jihad and in 1999 he attempted to travel to Georgia, carrying 12,000 US dollars, so as to be closer to the war in Chechnya, another site of conflict for the mujahedin. He claimed the money was for ‘humanitarian assistance’. In 2005 he was eventually convicted of plotting a terrorist attack after he was found in possession of training manuals giving instructions on how to fire 82mm mortars and coded messages about weapons and explosives. Deputy assistant commissioner Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terror Branch, said Rowe was ‘a global terrorist… A violent and dangerous man has been brought to justice.’

After an uneasy peace was reached in Bosnia in 1995, and the country was divided into separate Bosnian Muslim, Serbian and Croatian enclaves, Western intelligence officers set about gathering information on the mujahedin’s international brigades. One intelligence report, filed by the Nato-led Stabilisation Force known as SFOR, concluded that units ‘consisted of several hundred warriors. Some of them were also used as instructors in the Muslim Bosniac army.’

Corporal Jean-Philippe Lavigne, who filed that report, had been seconded to the US 629th Military Intelligence Battalion in Bosnia near the town of Zenica, where the mujahedin fighters had been based during the conflict. As well as gathering intelligence on their past activities, he observed how many had settled in the country, marrying local women and introducing a fierce, puritanical version of Islam to the region, in complete contrast to the mild, tolerant faith practised by most Bosnian Muslims (who tended to be ethnic Slavic converts) before the war. ‘Strict Islamic law…began to govern affairs. Women there took to wearing veils and long black robes, and men had long beards. They didn’t drink or smoke or speak to visitors,’ he wrote.

In Britain, against the background of the Bosnian jihad, Bakri Mohammed began to tour towns and cities with large Muslim populations. There were frequent al-Muhajiroun meetings in London, Luton, Derby, Manchester and Crawley. It was in Crawley where he encountered a new recruit, a restless teenager named Omar Khyam. Khyam was not from a fundamentalist family: his uncle, who lived on the same street, was married to a white Christian woman and prided himself on his secularism. His father, who ran a textile business from Karachi and Belgium, was absent for long periods of time but friends say his son appeared stable and happy at school where he was admired as an outstanding cricketer. Like many teenagers he enjoyed music and fast cars. But in the late 1990s his behaviour began to change. He fell under the influence of a group of radicals who prayed at his local mosque at Langley Green.

Khyam’s family began to notice changes in him. He became far more interested in Islam and started praying five times a day and reading the Qur’an. This relatively privileged middle-class boy was becoming obsessed with Islamism and in particular with the conflict between Pakistan and India over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir. As Khyam’s uncle would tell me later, few in the community knew much, if anything, about radical political Islam at the time, and Bakri Mohammed fully exploited this ignorance. The radical cleric lectured at Khyam’s youth club in Crawley and, in 1999, managed to get himself invited to lead the sixth-form assembly at Hazlewick School, where Khyam was a pupil. ‘He did come into the school in the name of religious inclusion,’ said Gordon Parry, the present head teacher, who taught there at the time. ‘We didn’t know about his background or views. No one really realized at the time. There was a kind of collective naivety about radical Islamic lecturers then.’

Some prominent members of Crawley’s Muslim community were concerned about Bakri Mohammed’s influence on boys. Khyam’s uncle, Sajjad Ahmed, says the community tried to ban al-Muhajiroun from speaking at the Langley Green mosque and the youth club and attempted to stop the group distributing leaflets in the town. ‘We did as much as we could,’ he told me. ‘They preyed on boys at the mosque and even in the shopping centres, getting them when they were young and impressionable. They showed them videos of the injustices Muslims were suffering, and then channelled their anger into hatred.’

In 1999, on a family holiday to Pakistan, Khyam met a representative of a terrorist group that trained fighters in Kashmir. He was inspired. He returned to Britain determined to help fight the Indian army in Kashmir, and in January 2000 he told his mother he was going on an educational trip to France, then flew to Pakistan alone. Once there his old contacts proved invaluable. Travelling east from Islamabad into the foothills of the Himalayas, Khyam made his way to a camp in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir where he spent three months training with automatic weapons. He has said that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, was providing much of the training, a credible claim supported by some inside the Ministry of Defence.

Back in Crawley, Khyam’s family were making desperate attempts to locate him. His uncle sought a meeting with Bakri Mohammed to try to find out precisely where his nephew had gone. Bakri Mohammed denied any involvement, but said that if Khyam had left to train at a camp in Pakistan he should be ‘praised for fulfilling his Islamic duty’; the family should be proud of his courage. In the end, through the family’s contacts at Military Intelligence in Pakistan, Khyam was tracked down to the camp high in the mountains. Messages were relayed to his commanders and, eventually, the young recruit agreed to come down to meet his grandfather, who was waiting for him in the valley below. Khyam agreed to travel back to Britain where, to the surprise of much of the family, he received a hero’s welcome, with supporters lining the hall of his house, showering him with flower petals as he walked in.

By now it was clear to all who knew him that Khyam, the boy who had supported Manchester United and wanted to play cricket for England, was in thrall to extreme political Islam. In an attempt to break its hold, his family persuaded him to return to full-time education. He was due to start a foundation course at London Metropolitan University in the autumn of 2001, but in the summer he travelled back to Pakistan again, ostensibly to attend a friend’s wedding. Once there he slipped over the border into Afghanistan.

Shortly after Khyam had returned from Afghanistan I called his family to ask for an interview with him. They put me in contact with Khyam by phone. He told me that he had travelled ‘all over Afghanistan’, adding that ‘the Taliban are the most hospitable people in the world’. He estimated that there were 60,000 families from the Arabian peninsula living in Afghanistan and that Osama bin Laden had a firing range near the capital, Kabul. He refused to elaborate about the ‘firing range’ but he said it was easy for British recruits to get into Afghanistan. ‘All you have to do is contact pro-Taliban groups in Pakistan,’ he explained. ‘They have stalls. You get in with them.’ Four years later Khyam was arrested in a hotel room in Crawley as the prime suspect in a plot to blow up bars and nightclubs, including the Ministry of Sound in London, with a home-made fertilizer bomb.

the war on terror

On September 11, 2001 at 08.46.40 Eastern Standard Time, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Sixteen minutes and thirty-one seconds later, United Airlines Flight 175 was flown straight into the South Tower. These horrific attacks and their aftermath were captured on live television; for al-Qaida it was a huge propaganda coup. That night, in the Iqra Islamic centre in Beeston, Leeds, Mohammed Sidique Khan organized an unofficial party to celebrate the operation which had claimed 3,000 lives. The future leader of the London bombers was running community activities at the centre with extremist associates.

Nine days later, President George Bush addressed the Senate: ‘Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.’

The president’s war on terror had begun.

Back in Britain analysts working in the Vauxhall Cross headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, were re-examining every lead on Islamist extremism in their files. On mainland Europe there was a similar push for intelligence and soon evidence from recent counterterrorist operations was being reassessed. Two days after the September 11 attacks, I flew to Milan to meet an Italian counterterrorism officer who had agreed to show me a terrorist safe house which had recently been raided by the police.

Driving in an unmarked car, we entered a shabby suburb on the outskirts of the city. The officer slowed down and pointed up at a dilapidated flat. When the Italian police had broken down the door they had found a document factory inside; forged passports, some incomplete, were scattered across the flat. There were lists of telephone numbers and motivational videos celebrating jihad.

I was told the flat had been secretly bugged before the police raid and the occupants, four Tunisian men led by a Sami Ben Khemais Essid, were recorded discussing explosives training they had received in Afghanistan and their support of the ‘Sheikh’, a reference to Osama bin Laden. Police believe they were planning to target the US Embassy in Rome. Ben Khemais Essid was known to be a supporter of a North African terror network. He was covertly tracked across Europe as he travelled by train to meet other cells of extremists in Germany and in Spain, where he visited a Syrian radical named Abu Dahdah. Both men were full of praise for a London-based cleric name d Abu Qatada, whom they regarded as a spiritual leader. Other intelligence, this time from Germany, also pointed to the cleric’s Europe-wide influence. In December 2000, German special forces had raided an apartment in Frankfurt. Inside they found bomb-making equipment, false identity papers and a video of what appeared to be a reconnaissance trip to the Christmas market in Strasbourg. The video recordings were made on December 23. Four men, led by Salim Boukari, were all later convicted of planning to bomb the market in Strasbourg. Prosecutors said three of the four men had spent time in Sheffield and London, planning and fund-raising for the attack. In February 2001, British counterterrorism police questioned Abu Qatada in connection with the Christmas market plot. He was in possession of £170,000 in cash and an envelope containing £805 marked ‘For the mujahedin in Chechnya’. The Terrorism Act (2000) made it an offence if someone ‘knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that it [money] will or may be used for the purposes of terrorism’. Abu Qatada was questioned by the Metropolitan Police but released without charge in February 2001.

Like many Islamist radicals, Abu Qatada had found refuge in England in 1993 when he arrived from Jordan to claim asylum, which he was granted the following year. He would be joined in Britain by many other Islamic militants from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Maghrib. Some of these asylum seekers, especially those from North Africa, had previously been living in France but had left the country when the French authorities cracked down on Islamic militants after a bombing outrage on the Paris Metro on July 25, 1995 carried out by Algerians. The French intelligence service warned their British counterparts about the activities of Abu Qatada and other Islamists living in London. The French considered London – or ‘Londonistan’, as it became known – to be a safe haven for Islamic radicals, just as it had been for revolutionaries and anarchists in the nineteenth century. They were alarmed by the carelessness of the British security services, by how seemingly relaxed they were about the threat posed by radical Islam and by how porous the British borders were.

When I returned from Italy towards the end of September 2001, I wrote to Abu Qatada to request a meeting but received no reply. Neighbours said that he had left his house in Acton, west London, and had disappeared. I was told that he used to lecture after Friday prayers at a youth club called the Four Feathers, just north of the Marylebone Road in London, but when I turned up at the club the doors were chained shut. A note on the door explained that the club had been temporarily moved to an office building on the nearby Lisson Green estate.

A week or so later, on a cold autumn morning, I rode my motorbike on to the council estate and parked outside the ramshackle building that served as the youth centre’s office. I was looking for a woman with grey hair in her sixties named Betty Muspratt, a youth worker who, I’d been told, had met Abu Qatada. She had worked on the estate for thirteen years and, it seemed, knew everybody and everybody’s secrets. She told me how she had met Abu Qatada in 1996 and how his lectures had quickly become popular. ‘Between one hundred and one hundred and forty Muslims met at the Four Feathers club every Friday,’ she said. ‘The only time I saw Abu Qatada is when he came around with an interpreter to negotiate the rent – the club gets forty pounds a week for the prayer room so I thought, why not?’

Abu Qatada’s followers revered him for his deep knowledge of jihadi theology. He told them that the mujahedin fighters are sacred to God. ‘The role of mujahedin is dictated by what the prophet said: “Whoever fights to make the word of God supreme, then it is for the sake of God.” Therefore, if the jihad is to make the word of God supreme, this is what we call the Islamic Jihad.’ In an interview he gave to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he said, ‘No doubt that human life is based on conflict. This is what we see today and is confirmed by the conflicts which arose between sects, countries and groups. No rights or principles can be respected, accepted or imposed except through the use of force.’

Extremists from across Europe visited the Lisson Green estate to hear Abu Qatada speak. Djamel Beghal, Kamel Daoudi, Nizar Trabelsi and Jerome Courtailler, who would each be convicted of terrorism offences, were all known to have met the cleric. The so-called twentieth hijacker in the September 11 attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, knew Abu Qatada well and is believed to have attended Friday prayers at Lisson Green. Audio tapes of Abu Qatada’s sermons were found in the Hamburg flat of Mohammed Atta, the September 11 terrorist leader.

Abu Qatada’s teachings, in the incongruous surroundings of an inner-city youth club, were in direct support of terrorism overseas and MI5 was aware of this. Betty Muspratt told me that police officers approached her as early as 1999 to ask if a covert camera could be installed at the Four Feathers club to record Abu Qatada’s meetings. It is not clear whether this camera was ever fitted, but an intelligence analyst, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, was shown a video recording of Abu Qatada addressing a group of twelve followers in London in 2001, before the September 11 attacks. His disciples, sitting around him in a dimly lit room, ask about jihad and suicide attacks. Abu Qatada replies that such acts are permissible and that paradise is waiting. ‘I can smell paradise in the air,’ he says. Comments such as this and his alleged links to European terrorist cells led Spain’s leading counterterrorism judge, Baltasar Garzon, to name Abu Qatada as the ‘spiritual leader of the mujahedin in Europe’, an accusation denied by the cleric.

Abu Qatada is an exponent of a violent Islamic doctrine known as takfirism. Followers, known as takfiris, believe that it is religiously permissible to punish other Muslims who oppose an Islamic revival. They take the arrogant and deadly view that Muslims who oppose them are also opposing the will of God. Those who oppose the will of God render themselves apostates, and the penalty for apostasy is death. This is the doctrine of takfir as introduced to modern Islamic thought by Sayyid Qutb.

‘No doubt that the Qur’an, the Sunna and the life of the Prophet order the Muslim to carry on jihad and fighting,’ Abu Qatada has said. ‘This is something no Muslim can deny. Any Sheikh who tries to deny it or strip it of its real meaning is considered an act of apostasy. No doubt human life is based on conflict…no rights or principles can be respected, accepted or imposed except through the use of force.’

Three months after my first meeting with Betty Muspratt, I returned to Lisson Green. This was in December 2001 and US forces had just defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. I had been invited to watch and film youth-club rappers who met every week in a community hall. A young black teenager held the microphone aloft, swaggering across the makeshift stage: ‘My name is MC Jetski and I’m MC-ing for the Taliban Crew. Because of the war, yeah, we’re all Muslims.’

This was more than teenage bluster. Over the preceding two years radical Islam had swept through the estate. At its peak, in 1999, around fifty teenagers living in Lisson Green converted to Islam. Some other children who were already Muslim suddenly became far more devout. Certainly Betty Muspratt noticed a change. She said that most parents were pleased their children were staying away from crime and drugs. Islam, it seemed, offered new direction. ‘I just felt they were so positive,’ she said. ‘They showed respect with heads held high.’

What the relieved parents did not know was that the boys were being converted by a ‘messiah-like’ figure who had returned to the estate after serving time in prison. This man, of North African origin, was known as Michael Jean-Pierre (it is not clear if this was his real name) and had fought in Bosnia with the mujahedin. He had returned home with shrapnel in his leg and began grooming teenagers on the estate by introducing them to radical Islam. Soon there was talk among these young converts of travelling abroad to deepen their knowledge of Islam.

One afternoon I sat in the kitchen of a small flat in Lisson Green and listened to an energetic, determined Eritrean Christian mother named Fifi Walker explain how extremism had affected her life. Her two sons, Hosea and Malaky, had converted to Islam in 1999. Soon afterwards they told their mother that they were dropping out of school to travel to Yemen. By the spring of 2000, fifteen-year-old Hosea and seventeen-year-old Malaky were studying at a madrasa 200 kilometres north of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, close to the border with Saudi Arabia. They had travelled with three other boys from the estate, stopping off in Saudi Arabia on the way. Their air tickets were paid for by a mysterious Muslim benefactor and visas had been arranged. Just a couple of weeks after arriving at the school, Hosea was shot dead.

The family was told it was a tragic accident. One of the group of boys who had gone from Lisson Green to Yemen had apparently bought a gun from a local market and had accidentally discharged the weapon while he was cleaning it. Hosea, who was sitting next to him, was fatally wounded in the chest. His death prompted the British Ambassador in Yemen, Victor Henderson, to make his own enquiries. He discovered that there were thirty British pupils at the madrasa. Hosea’s family believe to this day that he would not have agreed to train for jihad and deny any suggestions that he might have received arms training. They say he was simply studying Arabic, but when I started to check the details of this story I came across evidence that supports the notion that the school was encouraging extremism.

American intelligence reports suggest that the head of the madrasa where Hosea studied was a fundamentalist cleric named Sheikh Muqbil al-Wadii. Evidence given during military hearings at the US detention centre in Guantánamo Bay puts forward the possibility that three ‘enemy combatants’ had passed through Sheikh Muqbil’s hands in Yemen. The American intelligence reports allege that he funded trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where his young protégés trained in al-Qaida camps.

Other boys from the Lisson Green estate who travelled to Yemen also came under the influence of terrorist sympathizers. Richard Belmar, a big St Lucian lad who had grown up with Hosea and Malaky, travelled to Kandahár in Afghanistan in July 2001. He was later captured and taken to Guantánamo Bay as an ‘enemy combatant’. Belmar told a US military tribunal that he had been trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan and attended public meetings led by the emir of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden. He had been at lectures in London given by Abu Qatada at the Four Feathers youth club.

So the question has to be asked again: why were Abu Qatada and others like him allowed to live and preach in London? The answer lies in the attitude of the security services throughout the 1990s, right up to 2003. One intelligence analyst I spoke to told me that security officials had been hoping to garner intelligence from Abu Qatada and other radicals in exchange for allowing them the right to live in Britain. It ended up being a very one-sided deal. In the opinion of the analyst I spoke to, Abu Qatada ‘turned the whole of Europe into a recruiting ground for terror’ while offering very little to the Security Service in return. It is also possible that MI5 was being given false information by their agents inside the jihadi networks. I have spoken to a senior Muslim leader who fears there may be individuals within the police, and perhaps even MI5, working as agents of influence on behalf of the jihadists. The community elder I spoke to (whose identity I have agreed to protect) told me that following a confidential meeting with police, during which he named extremists operating in his town, one of those he identified had threatened him and warned him not to speak to the police again. The elder believes he was betrayed.

For an insider’s view on how much the Security Service knew, I turned to Sir David Omand, who was appointed the British government’s intelligence coordinator in 2002. Sir David is a former head of the Government Communications Headquarters, the interception and analysis centre in Cheltenham known as GCHQ. He says the radicalization of British Muslims was being ‘observed and monitored’ by the security authorities before the September 11 attacks. ‘This phenomenon was certainly not missed by the UK authorities, although being able to prove that a criminal offence against UK law, as it then stood, was being planned was obviously tricky in relation to most of the propaganda and collection of funds [through registered charities]. The important point is that security authority monitoring of this activity did not reveal intentions to direct violence in the UK or at UK interests overseas.’

It seems there was an unwritten agreement that Islamist radicals could operate freely in Britain so long as their activities were concentrated abroad. British authorities were effectively relying on an Islamic concept called the Covenant of Security under which, according to Islamic law, Muslims should never attack their hosts unless they themselves are under attack. The assumption that this covenant would protect British interests at home allowed the extremist clerics to operate without restriction from the British state.

the pakistan connection

In February 2001, seven months before the September 11 attacks, a heavy-set man with a checked Saudi scarf over his face stood on a grass verge outside a commercial office building in Tottenham, north London, which served as the British headquarters of al-Muhajiroun. ‘My name is Izzadeen and I am from London,’ he said. ‘There is a growing surge among Muslim communities inside the UK that stretches from Bradford all the way down to London,’ he continued. ‘Muslims are recognizing their responsibility towards Muslims outside, whether that be inside Kashmir or inside Chechnya or inside Saudi Arabia. Recruitment is taking place in many mosques and many are coming forward to train for jihad.’

Three other jihadists standing next to him, their faces concealed like his, nodded in approval. Izzadeen Abdullah, a convert to Islam, said that training Islamist radicals for jihad was already well under way in Britain. ‘Muslims inside the UK will train physically, they will do some navigational skills, they will do some patrolling skills and they will do some ambushing skills – they will do skills needed for jihad but without weapons. But for training that fulfils the obligation – because we are talking of something that is prescribed by Islam – they must go abroad and train with weapons.’

Izzadeen was raised in east London, the son of Christian Jamaican parents. After converting to Islam at the age of seventeen, he left Britain to live in Pakistan and Kashmir, where he spent seven months training with weapons. If Omar Bakri Mohammed and Abu Qatada were the first generation of terrorist sympathizers and propagandists to recruit in Britain, young men such as Izzadeen were the next. ‘There are some Muslims who go to America because light arms are available there,’ he told me. ‘But why not take the opportunity to use the heart of the enemy that is attacking us?’

At the time of our meeting, two organizations were offering military-style training to supporters of al-Muhajiroun. A company called Sakina Security Services was advertising ‘the ultimate jihad challenge’, a course in firearms training in the American state of Alabama. Another group, based at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London under the leadership of the radical cleric Abu Hamza, was offering training at a camp deep in the Oregon backcountry, near the farming community of Bly. MI5 would have known about plans to send British citizens abroad for arms training – Hamza’s organization openly advertised on the Internet – yet no action was taken beyond maintaining the existing policy of watch and wait.

By the time I met Izzadeen, al-Muhajiroun had established a base in New York – its first overseas branch. Supporters would congregate at the Masjid al-Fatima mosque in Queens, which, in the mid-1990s, had been taken over by radicals from Hizb ut-Tahrir. New York quickly became an important centre of political work for al-Muhajiroun, but it was Pakistan that was central to the group’s international plans. For its leader Bakri Mohammed the country held numerous attractions. A large network of fundamentalist madrasas was already in place; many of the most radical had been supported by the CIA during the 1980s, when Muslim fundamentalism was used as a powerful force to be deployed against the Soviet army in Afghanistan. These schools, and the training camps associated with them, provided a regular flow of fighters for the mujahedin. Bakri Mohammed believed these same networks could be exploited to provide training for al-Muhajiroun’s members, who could also count on the support of some radical elements within Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, which had a long history of training the volunteers to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Lastly, but perhaps most significantly, Pakistan was a nuclear power.

On November 24, 1999 Bakri Mohammed sent some of his most trusted aides to Lahore to launch the Pakistan branch of al-Muhajiroun. They held a press conference in the city to mark the event. Izzadeen was there, as was Abu Uzair, the man whom I would film five years later describing the terrorist attacks on the twin towers as ‘magnificent’. These pioneers were soon joined by two brothers from England, Adeel and Sajeel Shahid, who set up an office in Lahore in a single-storey, modern house at 101 Aurangzeb Block in New Garden Town. This address, with its neat lawn and shrubs outside, was the first place of arrival for a procession of young, committed jihadists who began to arrive from Britain.

Sajeel Shahid, a science graduate from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, was the more charismatic of the two brothers. Shahid has always denied involvement in extremism, but it is known that he took over the leadership of al-Muhajiroun in Pakistan and soon befriended a well-known Islamist named Khalid Khawaja, who worked for the ISI and claimed to be ‘a personal friend’ of Osama bin Laden.

With a support network in place, even more jihadi recruits began to arrive from Britain. In December 2000 a young Muslim from Birmingham named Bilal Mohammed travelled to Pakistan and made contact with al-Muhajiroun. He was recruited by extremists from the Pakistani group Jaish e-Mohammed and was trained to use explosives. On Christmas Day 2000 Bilal Mohammed became Britain’s first Islamic suicide bomber when he put on an explosive vest and blew himself up outside an Indian army barracks in Kashmir, killing six soldiers and three local students in the blast. In Pakistan he was feted by Jaish e-Mohammed leaders as a martyr, while in Britain al-Muhajiroun proudly claimed him as one of their own.

One week after the September 11 attacks an American-Pakistani student named Mohammed Iqbal, a recruit from the New York branch of al-Muhajiroun, set off for Pakistan. First he flew to London, where he stayed with supporters of al-Muhajiroun and attended an Islamist rally outside the Pakistan High Commission in Lowndes Square. He eventually arrived in Lahore in the last week of September 2001 and moved into a house occupied by a British jihadi from Manchester named Hassan Butt. Born in Luton in 1980, Butt became involved in Islamist politics at the age of sixteen. Following his expulsion from Wolverhampton University for Islamist activity, he was part of the vanguard who had arrived in Pakistan from Britain to help set up the al-Muhajiroun operation. He was valued as an excellent organizer and fund-raiser. (He would later publicly renounce his commitment to radical Islam.)

On October 7, American bombers attacked Afghanistan from bases in the Persian Gulf and from Diego Garcia, the British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean. US Special Forces moved into the country to coordinate fighters from the Northern Alliance, which opposed the Taliban. After less than five weeks of battle, Mullah Omar’s Taliban theocracy was ousted from Kabul, but this humiliation served only to intensify the commitment of the British jihadis.

One young British volunteer who travelled to Pakistan was Kazi Rahman, who would be convicted in London in 2006 of trying to buy sub-machine guns from an undercover police officer at a motorway service station. In October 2001 he arrived in Lahore and went straight to al-Muhajiroun’s office, where he was given money and assistance to cross the border into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. A source close to al-Muhajiroun told me how he had bought weapons from another British jihadi, Omar Sheikh, who was later indicted for kidnapping and murdering the American journalist Daniel Pearl. Omar Sheikh had become radicalized while studying at the London School of Economics and had direct contacts with al-Qaida in Pakistan.

In the weeks after the coalition attack on Afghanistan, a Canadian journalist named Anne Barnard met Mohammed Iqbal and Hassan Butt in a hotel lobby in Islamabad. They were with a man who was British and gave his name as Abdul Momin, almost certainly a pseudonym. Iqbal told Barnard that he felt ‘absolutely no remorse’ about the September 11 attacks. ‘I saw the towers collapse but felt nothing for the Americans inside. I may hold an American passport, but I am not an American. I am a Muslim… I’m willing to kill the Americans. I will kill every American that I see in Afghanistan. And I’ll kill every American soldier that I see in Pakistan.’

Hassan Butt claimed that one hundred foreign fighters had come to Pakistan to fight alongside the Taliban – at least sixty of them from Britain. Two recruits from Luton, Afzal Munir and Aftab Manzoor, both aged twenty-five, died in bombing raids on Kabul. A third Briton, Yasir Khan, from Crawley, was also killed in the raids. But Hassan Butt, who had taken on the role of media spokesman for al-Muhajiroun in Pakistan, praised their bravery. ‘We are very envious, very happy for these people who have become martyrs,’ he said. ‘We too would like to be like this because to live and die for Islam is every Muslim’s role in life.’

In spite of the deaths the number of recruits from Britain continued to grow. On October 4, 2001 Waheed Mahmood from Crawley left his job with British Telecom; he said he was on his way to attend a wedding in Pakistan. In fact, once in Pakistan he met Hassan Butt in Lahore and stayed on in the city, living in his flat there, the latest recruit to jihad.

In the period following the September 11 attacks, other British jihadists arrived in Pakistan’s major cities. What they needed, however, was a way to get out to the North-west Frontier Province and to establish contact with al-Qaida and the remnants of the Taliban regime. A government-controlled computer company was to provide the perfect cover. On November 14, 2001 the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) appointed a new managing director from Britain. His name was Sohail Shahid and he was the elder brother of Sajeel and Adeel, the two men who had set up al-Muhajiroun’s office in Pakistan. Al-Muhajiroun viewed this as a master stroke, because the software company’s government status could now be exploited for jihad. The PSEB had a network of guest houses across the country, so accommodation was no longer a problem for volunteers arriving from Britain, and the company had unparalleled access to advanced computers and websites, which were vital for disseminating al-Muhajiroun’s propaganda. It also had access to official government papers and passes, which would guarantee safe passage through army checkpoints, even into remote areas in the North-west Frontier Province.

While his older brother was in charge, Sajeel Shahid, al-Muhajiroun’s local leader, was given a twelve-month consultancy agreement with the PSEB. Hassan Butt remembers how ‘Sajeel would come into the offices dressed like the Taliban, whereas everyone else agreed to trim their beards and wear Western clothes to be discreet.’ He says that the PSEB was being ‘flooded’ with al- Muhajiroun supporters.

The American jihadist Mohammed Iqbal was given a job with the software company and, conveniently, was posted to Peshawar, close to the border with Afghanistan. He was responsible for setting up a new technology park, but he seldom turned up for work. He later admitted to forging PSEB government passes to allow his jihadi contacts to move around Pakistan. Three government laptop computers he stole ended up in the hands of terrorists and his business card was found on what was left of the body of a suicide bomber who had blown himself up in Karachi.

There was growing disquiet in Pakistan about how the PSEB was being managed. In April 2002, Pakistan’s Auditor General conducted an investigation into the company and concluded that there were serious financial irregularities. Sohail Shahid was forced out, though he says he did nothing wrong. When I spoke to him in 2006 I asked him if the PSEB had been run for the benefit of jihadis. He said no. ‘I pushed from the start to keep anybody from al-Muhajiroun away from the company,’ he said. He left the organization at the end of the 2002, as did Iqbal and other staff connected to al-Muhajiroun.

Al-Muhajiroun may have lost its government cover, but its support structure for jihad was by now well established. Hassan Butt says that at least 200 British citizens passed through the Pakistan network. While some were naive dreamers, others had murderous intent. Two of Bakri Mohammed’s recruits, Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif, arrived in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv on April 30, 2003. They paused outside Mike’s Place, a popular seafront music bar. If anyone had been watching closely, what happened next was a sure sign of an attack. They dropped their passports and wallets into a skip and walked towards the main door. Twenty-one-year-old Hanif, described by friends at Southall mosque in west London as a ‘gentle giant’, detonated his suicide belt as a security guard tried to stop them going inside. The explosion ripped through the bar; three people died. Sharif’s belt failed to explode and he fled the scene; his dead body was found in the sea several days later.

Both Hanif and Sharif had been supporters of al-Muhajiroun. They attacked Israel in the name of the Palestinian group Hamas, but their radicalization can be traced back to the summer of 2001, before the September 11 attacks, when they were in contact with Mohammed Sidique Khan, the future leader of the London bombers.

the covenant is broken

During his time with the Pakistan Software Export Board, Mohammed Iqbal was free to roam the North-west Frontier Province. Looking across towards the Khyber Pass and Jalálábád beyond, he was frustrated by the success of Operation Enduring Freedom, which had forced the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. The training camps were closed and many of their allies were dead or in hiding. No longer could would-be jihadists visit Afghanistan to be trained in terrorist camps and al-Muhajiroun needed to find a way of training jihadists at new camps in the mountains of Pakistan.

In February 2003 Iqbal travelled across the North-west Frontier Province for five days with Sajeel Shahid, al-Muhajiroun’s leader in Pakistan. They were looking for land where they would be free to train with guns and explosives. They found what they thought was the perfect area, high up in the mountains, several hours’ walk from the road. A local religious leader agreed to help arrange training with arms. The two men returned to Peshawar excited at having found the location for a new training camp.

In the following weeks, British jihadis in Pakistan whiled away the dead hours in coffee bars. They felt they had reached an impasse. With coalition forces firmly in control in Afghanistan, they questioned the purpose of launching suicide missions across the border. Many international fighters from al-Qaida had already died; al-Muhajiroun recruits had lost their lives as well. They firmly believed these men were martyrs – each one had become a shaheed – but the wider political goal to eject the infidel from Muslim lands, to create support for a caliphate, was no further forward. At a country house at Gujar Khan, near Rawalpindi, which had been built by Waheed Mahmood from Crawley, they began to discuss something entirely new and daring – mounting attacks on Britain from within Britain. What we need to do, Omar Khyam told his friends, ‘is to hit the UK,’ especially ‘pubs, nightclubs and trains’.

Shortly after the meeting at Gujar Khan, many members of the al-Muhajiroun network returned to Britain, where they set about raising funds for further training in Pakistan. They held a barbecue in the garden of a house in Colindale, north London, occupied by Zaheer Ali, an al-Muhajiroun leader. The party – the jihadi equivalent of a charity dinner – went on long into the night. Several groups of committed extremists came together here. There were the ‘Crawley Boys’ – Omar Khyam, Waheed Mahmood and Jawad Akbar; the ‘East London Crew’, led by Anthony Garcia; and a group called the ‘Luton Boys’. Hassan Butt, who had driven down from Manchester in his brother’s sports car, was also present. Large tins for donations were passed around, and these were filled with banknotes amounting to many hundreds of pounds.

Precisely how much MI5 knew about what was going on is unclear. But I do know that MI5 was aware of the Luton cell as early as March 2003. Surveillance officers were also watching a Bedfordshire taxi driver they had code-named ‘Bashful Dwarf’. He was under investigation for supplying money and equipment, such as night-vision glasses and camping gear, to al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan and was suspected of using human couriers to transport the goods abroad. MI5 also had, on file, the details of a telephone call he had made to someone named ‘Siddeque Khan’ [sic] in Beeston, Yorkshire. We now know that this was Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the London bombers. MI5 said later that neither of these men was considered a direct threat to Britain at the time because the focus of their activities and schemes seemed to be in Pakistan.

On May 6, 2003 Omar Khyam flew to Pakistan once again. As he entered the country he was photographed by the computerized immigration system PISCES, which had been paid for by the Americans to help Pakistan fight the president’s war on terror. Khyam drove to Kohát, in the North-west Frontier Province, to attend a training camp where recruits learned how to make the poison ricin by grinding castor oil beans and how to make crude but deadly home-made explosives by mixing ammonium nitrate fertilizer with aluminium powder. These were available in local markets and could be bought without arousing suspicion. A test explosion in a mountain river near Kohát created a huge fountain of water. Fertilizer bombs had proved lethal in the past: a one-tonne IRA truck bomb had devastated the City of London on April 24, 1993 and in April 1995 Timothy McVeigh used a similar device to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

After completing the explosives course in Kohát, Omar Khyam joined Anthony Garcia, from London, and Jawad Akbar, from Crawley, for the journey to another camp near the border with Kashmir. To avoid detection they first took a detour up the beautiful Swat valley, posing as Western tourists, before moving on to the camp. As arranged, other British jihadists joined them there. Among them was Sidique Khan, who arrived in Pakistan together with a friend from Leeds, on July 25. They were met at Islamabad Airport and travelled to the camp by truck. Once there, they all practised firing automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Khyam took people aside at the camp to speak to them privately about their willingness to take part in a suicide mission. He also went with Sidique Khan and Anthony Garcia to a remote part of the camp to detonate half a kilogram of explosive they had made from mixing ammonium nitrate and powdered aluminium, ingredients bought from a local market. The small charge was placed in a plastic bottle and, recklessly, the fuse was lit by hand. The explosion created a U-shaped hole in the ground.

By November 2003, Sidique Khan and Omar Khyam had returned to Britain. Sidique Khan was back at work as a teaching assistant in Leeds, while Khyam began to gather a bombing team around him. Anthony Garcia was instructed to buy 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which was placed in a self-storage lock-up in west London, just off the A4. Sealed sachets of aluminium powder were hidden in an old biscuit tin in Khyam’s garden in Crawley. The plan to bomb targets in England was live.

operation crevice

MI5 continued to watch ‘Bashful Dwarf’. There were taps on his telephone and he was observed meeting numerous contacts, including Omar Khyam in London. This prompted MI5 to categorize Khyam as an essential target for surveillance. On another occasion surveillance officers followed a vehicle north up the M1. In the car were two unidentified suspects who were known to have been in contact with ‘Bashful Dwarf’. MI5 was watching as the driver dropped his passenger off in Leeds before making the short journey south to Dewsbury where, in surveillance officers’ language, he was ‘housed’ at his home address. This man was in fact Mohammed Sidique Khan – MI5 officers had just followed the future leader of the London bombers home.

Across the Atlantic, at the National Security Agency’s vast information factory at Fort Meade, near Washington, DC, arrays of supercomputers were, as usual, sifting through billions of global telephone calls and emails. On, or around, February 6, 2004 an electronic communication was intercepted between Omar Khyam in Britain and Salahuddin Amin in Pakistan. The intercept was so alarming that American security officers immediately contacted their counterparts in Britain. In the intercepted message, Khyam had asked about the correct ratios of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to aluminium powder necessary to make a viable bomb. His request prompted an urgent reassessment of MI5’s investigation into both ‘Bashful Dwarf’ and Khyam. Prime Minister Tony Blair was informed via the Joint Intelligence Committee. What had been an inquiry into a plot to provide material assistance to al-Qaida overseas now turned into a race to stop a terrorist attack on British soil. MI5 was sure that Khyam had the intent and capability to strike. All available resources were diverted into a huge counterterrorism operation, code-named Operation Crevice, run by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorism Branch. It became the biggest surveillance operation ever undertaken in Britain, during which ninety-seven telephone lines were tapped and 34,000 hours of surveillance material were gathered. For the commander of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stephens, ‘the great decision was how long to let it run and that’s when the police and the Security Service lose sleep. Because you want to get evidence you try and run it as long as you possibly can to get that evidence.’

On February 20, MI5 officers secretly recorded Omar Khyam at home talking to another man about obtaining detonators for a bomb. Coincidentally, on the same day, a member of staff at Access Self Storage telephoned the police to report his suspicions about the contents of the lock-up. Counterterrorist police officers arrived the next morning and, on finding the 600-kilogram bag of fertilizer, took samples for laboratory analysis. The ammonium nitrate explosive was switched for an identical-looking inert substance and surveillance cameras were installed in the lock-up to catch the conspirators when they returned.

Elsewhere the surveillance operation continued, occupying hundreds of officers from the police and MI5. They were watching and listening once again as Khyam met Sidique Khan and the two men were heard discussing whether to say goodbye to their families. In one of the recorded exchanges there were clear indications of which man held the higher rank:

Khan: ‘Are you really a terrorist?’
Khyam: ‘They’re working with us.’
Khan: ‘You’re serious?’
Khyam: ‘No, I’m not a terrorist but they’re working through us.’
Khan: ‘There’s no one higher than you.’

It is clear at this time that Khyam, the aspiring county cricketer from Crawley, was firmly in charge. Sidique Khan respected him as his leader, known in jihadi circles as an ‘emir’.

In counterterrorism operations such as this there is always a tension between the desire to gather more evidence by letting the plot run and preserving public safety by making arrests. Two weeks after Khyam and Sidique Khan had met, the dangers of misjudging this balance were plain to see. In Spain, on March 11, 2004, a terrorist cell remotely detonated three bombs on a packed early-morning commuter train as it pulled into Atocha station in Madrid. Over the next three minutes another seven bombs exploded on three other trains, injuring almost 2,000 people and leaving 191 dead. The fertilizer-bomb plotters were overheard celebrating the attacks.

‘Spain was such a beautiful job wasn’t it, absolutely beautiful man, so much impact,’ Waheed Mahmood said.

As pictures of the devastation at Atocha station were broadcast across the world, the consequences of losing control of Operation Crevice in Britain were clear. What if the conspirators had another stash of fertilizer in an unknown location? Could a second bomb be ready to be deployed?

Four days after the Madrid attacks, the waiting game was rewarded. Surveillance cameras recorded Khyam returning to Access Self Storage to inspect the 600-kilogram fertilizer bag. He chatted casually to a new female member of staff at the front desk, explaining to her that this would be the last month he would need storage. She was an undercover officer from MI5. Later, conversations secretly recorded in cars and houses suggested an attack was close. Surveillance officers overheard Khyam’s fellow conspirator Waheed Mahmood discussing how to bring the plan forward. ‘Is it worth getting all the brothers together tonight and asking who would be ready to go? A little explosion at Bluewater [the shopping centre in Kent] tomorrow if you want… We haven’t tested it but we could do one tomorrow.’

In another conversation, Khyam instructed the others on how to maximize the impact of an attack. ‘It has to be big, yeah, it has to be destructive and everything. That’s one. And second it has to be combined with something to make proper effect and terror.’

The conspirators were discussing attacking utilities.

‘It has to be a simultaneous thing. The electric goes up, so it’s a blackout. Then the gas lot move in and bang! Then the water – something goes on with the water. It’s a simultaneous attack.’

By the end of March, the Metropolitan Police decided they could wait no longer. In Britain, armed officers carried out simultaneous raids, shortly after six on the morning of April 30. They arrested Omar Khyam, Waheed Mahmood and Jawad Akbar in Crawley,
and Anthony Garcia in London, on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack.

At first, Khyam’s family supported him. His uncle Ansar Khan said that there was ‘absolutely no truth’ in the allegations. ‘These boys are the cricketers, they’re Manchester United fans. Fish and chips is their favourite food.’

Mohammed Iqbal flew back from Pakistan to New York. Four days later he too was arrested and agreed to testify against the conspirators. He had been with Khyam and the other plotters every step of the way. In Britain, everything was now set for a successful trial, during which it would become clear that the police and intelligence services had prevented a major terrorist attack.

the london bombings

In the weeks after the fertilizer-bomb plotters were arrested, there were signs that Sidique Khan was becoming anxious. He telephoned a relative of Khyam to ask him, guardedly, for news. Sidique Khan was reluctant to speak on the telephone and requested to meet him. The two men agreed to meet on the seafront in Grimsby. Sidique Khan was trying to find out whether the police or MI5 had been asking questions about Khyam’s wider circle of contacts. He knew that his phone number was on Khyam’s mobile phone, which the police had. In fact, Sidique Khan had less to worry about than he may have feared.

After Khyam’s arrest, MI5 assessed all of his contacts, including Sidique Khan, dividing them into essential and desirable targets. The future leader of the London bombers was categorized as desirable but not essential; he was not placed under surveillance or investigated intensively because resources were already stretched. To MI5, he was a peripheral figure, a petty fraudster who might be interested in jihad abroad but who was not judged to be an imminent threat.

MI5 operatives had bugged and trailed Sidique Khan when he was with Omar Khyam on at least four occasions in February and March 2004. At the time, it is said, MI5 did not know Sidique Khan’s real name, even though they had twice followed him to home addresses in Dewsbury and Batley. In June 2004 further checks on his car registration did produce the name ‘Sidique Khan’. Running this name through the database would have brought up details of his conversation with ‘Bashful Dwarf’, who was under investigation for supporting al-Qaida in Pakistan. At this point, they had their sights on a British extremist who was already known to have been close to the leader of the fertilizer-bomb plot and who had been associating with a man linked to al-Qaida. They knew all of this a year before the London bombings.

Six months after the fertilizer-bomb plotters were arrested, Sidique Khan filmed himself in a video farewell at his home in Leeds. Cradling his baby daughter in his arms, he kisses her on the head and speaks into the camera. ‘Not got too long to go now and I’m going to really, really miss you. I absolutely love you to bits. You’ve been the happiest thing in my life. I’m doing what I’m doing for the sake of Islam.’

In November, Sidique Khan travelled to Pakistan once again, this time with Shehzad Tanweer. It remains unconfirmed but it is likely that the two men sought out their old al-Qaida contacts in the North-west Frontier Province. Judging by the finality of Sidique Khan’s farewell message, he was not expecting to come back. It is possible that he intended to die fighting with the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. If so, his tactics abruptly changed.

On the morning of July 7, 2005 the nation awoke to news of simultaneous power cuts on the London Underground. The inevitable was swiftly confirmed: four coordinated terrorist attacks on the capital – three on the Tube, one on a bus – had taken place. Terrorists had murdered fifty-two people and injured 700 with crude but deadly home-made bombs.

Police forensic teams moved in, sifting through the twisted metal and torn flesh at the sites of the explosions. The first bomb had exploded on a Circle Line train in a tunnel between Liverpool Street and Aldgate stations; the second was detonated on another Circle Line train, just outside Edgware Road station; the third in a Piccadilly Line tunnel between King’s Cross and Russell Square, with the fourth on a number 30 red double-decker bus in Tavistock Square.

Just before midnight on the day of the bombings, fragments of credit cards and membership cards in the names of Sidique Khan and Mr S. Tanweer were recovered at Aldgate. Evidence of a second card linked to a Sidique Khan was found at the scene of the Edgware Road attack the next day and shortly afterwards the police named Hasib Hussain and Germaine Lindsay as other prime suspects. Meanwhile MI5 technical experts were analysing fragments of a mobile phone SIM card found at the Edgware Road bomb site. When they ran the number through the MI5 database, it immediately registered a ‘hit’ on the ‘Sidique Khan’ they had on their files – the man at the Iqra bookshop in Leeds, whom they had recorded talking with ‘Bashful Dwarf’ from Luton in 2003. Other checks revealed that this was the same man they had photographed and recorded in February and March 2004 when he was with Omar Khyam, the leader of the fertilizer-bomb plotters. They had been tracking the future leader of the London bombers, but had allowed him to slip through the net. According to an MI5 source, this failure cast ‘a huge cloud’ over the organization.

Within days of the bombings the focus of the investigation shifted to Leeds. The flat where the bombers had prepared their devices was quickly discovered. Abandoned equipment lay scattered around; a gas mask left by the sink had been used when boiling down hydrogen peroxide solution to make the explosives; plastic containers used to store the bombs were found in a bath filled with cold water, an attempt to keep the devices cool and stable. There was even a hand-written shopping list marked ‘Things 2 Do’.

Here was direct evidence of pre-attack planning. It listed ‘shrapnel’ from B&Q; ‘icepacks’ and ‘sun-blinds for the car’ to keep the bombs cool during transport to London; fifteen kilograms of powdered masala spice, a vital ingredient for the home-made bombs, and, curiously, a reference to ‘Chacha’, which is the Urdu word for uncle. ‘Chacha’ was the code word used to refer to members of al-Qaida based in Kohát in Pakistan. On the basis of this connection I am convinced that, in the days before the July 7 attacks, Sidique Khan sought final approval from his al-Qaida leader in the North-west Frontier Province.

On July 21, two weeks after the attacks, four other would-be suicide bombers struck in London: three on the Tube and one on a bus. This time, by good fortune, their devices failed to detonate and all four men were eventually caught and convicted. Only a flaw in the ratios of ingredients used to make the explosives saved London from another catastrophe. There are remarkable similarities between the two operations: both teams used triacetone triperoxide (TATP) explosives and both targeted the London Underground. It was no surprise to learn much later that Mukhtar Ibrahim, the leader of the July 21 bomb plot, had been out in Pakistan at the same time as Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. Like Khan, he had been under surveillance a year before the attack, in August 2004. Like Khan, he was not considered to be a direct threat.

In the days after the July 7 attacks, I followed the police investigation as it moved north to Beeston, one of the poorest suburbs of Leeds. It had now been established that three of the four bombers had been living there. Viewed from the surrounding dales, Beeston resembles a rusting hulk, with its decks of red-brick terraced houses climbing and falling with the terrain, separated from the glass offices and chrome-plate bars of the affluent city centre by a hostile sweep of motorway. I walked past washing-hung alleys strewn with wheelie bins. Blue-and-white police tape fluttered in the breeze outside the houses where the suspected bombers had lived.

A woman I met on the street offered to talk to me, but only in the privacy of her home. She was afraid of reprisals, so on the condition of anonymity she explained how she had married into the extended family of one of the bombers. She had been shown propaganda videos in the Iqra centre, where Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer used to meet. One local resident said that Khan had been a powerful figure who commanded respect for his work with drug addicts. Former colleagues at Hillside Primary School, where he had worked as a teaching assistant, told me how one of Britain’s worst mass murderers had seemed a ‘perfect role model’ for the children.

Shehzad Tanweer’s father, Mumtaz Tanweer, was a prominent Pakistani businessman in Beeston. He owned and ran South Leeds Fisheries, a fish and chip shop where his son worked after dropping out of university. The family were not giving any interviews, so I contacted one of Mumtaz Tanweer’s business colleagues. ‘Mr Mumtaz has been a friend of mine for thirty-five years,’ I was told. ‘His family are very hard-working, his son is number one. When we knew he was missing, we went to the mosque in Dewsbury, searching for him. Nobody had seen him. His father was terrified and said, “I’ve lost everything.” ’

‘Which mosque in Dewsbury?’ I asked.

‘The Markaz: we went straight there.’

Retracing the route taken by Shehzad Tanweer’s family on the night they discovered he was missing, I arrived in Dewsbury, a small town south of Leeds. The Dewsbury Markaz, as the mosque is known, is in a district named Savile Town, where the streets are overshadowed by the grime-blackened gritstone walls of textile mills. These mills once employed immigrants from the Indian subcontinent who arrived in England in their tens of thousands in the decades following the end of the Second World War. Dewsbury’s wealth was founded on the heavy woollen trade and before this, on the production of shoddy, the name for poor-quality cloth produced by grinding down old rags. The mills are mostly silent now; the Asda supermarket employs more people than the largest remaining firm. But the workers who arrived from Pakistan and from Gujarat, the predominately Muslim province of north-west India, have stayed; more than eighty per cent of the population is Muslim. Four decades since they arrived in England they are even more isolated, both geographically and culturally, from the rest of the town.

The Dewsbury Markaz is the European headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat, a secretive organization based in Pakistan and New Delhi. While the organization strongly denies involvement with terrorist violence, it is of increasing interest to MI5. According to a British Home Office report, supporters in Pakistan helped to create the extremist group Harakat-ut-Jihad-ul-Islami, known as HUJI. The report states that HUJI ‘has conducted kidnappings of foreigners, including Westerners (some Britons), some of whom were murdered.’

The British government’s official account of the London bombings has now confirmed that Shehzad Tanweer spent time with Tablighi Jamaat at its Dewsbury headquarters in the months before the attack. Mohammed Sidique Khan is believed to have joined him there. The organization’s supporters have also been implicated in other planned or actual terrorist atrocities in Europe. In January, Spain’s Guardia Civil police arrested fourteen Tablighi Jamaat followers in Barcelona, eleven of whom have since been charged with plotting to bomb the city’s transport system. Kafeel Ahmed, the man who crashed a burning Jeep into Glasgow airport’s passenger terminal last summer, also had links with Tablighi Jamaat in the Indian city of Bangalore.

With a standing capacity of 3,000, the Dewsbury Markaz, built in 1982, is one of the largest mosques in Britain. There is an Islamic school next to the mosque, which accepts both boarders and day pupils. I watched as about thirty teenage boys gathered in the yard. Dressed in simple robes, carrying small, cloth shoulder bags, they resembled a medieval religious order. They were preparing to leave for the weekend, travelling out on their mission, or jamaat, to bring back wayward Muslims into the fold of fundamentalist Islam. The older boys stay at mosques around the country; sometimes they travel abroad. Proselytizing is the core of the Tablighi doctrine.

I have since found out that the insularity of the Islamic school run by the movement in Dewsbury had been criticized by school inspectors three months before I visited in July 2005. An Ofsted investigation concluded that the school was overly concerned with religious instruction at the expense of mainstream education and that it provided poor preparation for life in multicultural Britain. Every morning was devoted to Islamic studies and memorizing the Qur’an; insufficient time was given to non-religious subjects in the afternoon. Unsurprisingly, it failed its inspection because ‘a considerable amount of teaching is unsatisfactory or poor in National Curriculum subjects’.

Walking through the streets of Savile Town beyond the school gates, it is quite possible to believe that Muslims there simply want to get on with their own lives, unaffected by and indifferent to wider society. Most of the area’s Muslim population are, like the Taliban movement, Deobandis, who regard themselves as Islamic purists, remaining close to the original teachings and life of the Prophet Muhammed. Strict Deobandis encourage women to remain at home and prohibit the free mixing of the sexes. Marriages are arranged. Deobandism was founded in nineteenth-century India, in the city of Deoband, partly as a political reaction against British rule. After partition in 1947, a network of Deobandi Islamic schools or madrasas was established in Pakistan and after this the movement spread to the West, with the Pakstani diaspora. There are now twenty-seven Deobandi schools in Britain and many mosques are under Deobandi control; the leading Deobandi seminary is in the Lancashire town of Bury.

In Britain, there are naturally Deobandis who are prepared to interact with mainstream society but, on the whole, most orthodox followers seek to separate themselves from non-Muslims. In Savile Town the sense of isolation is profound. Women walk the streets hidden under their black burqas, mesh screens covering their eyes. The visual message of separation is stark, and it is being repeated in towns and cities throughout England.

Britain has become a different country since the July 7 attacks. The head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, who is a black Briton of Guyanese origin, has warned that, because of the cultural isolation of Muslims in so many British towns, we may be ‘sleepwalking our way to segregation’. In many places segregation has already arrived. If you travel to Dewsbury, Bradford, Burnley or Rochdale, or any number of other post-industrial towns in the north of England or the Midlands, you will see Muslim communities living apart from the rest of society. One Pakistani taxi driver I interviewed in Birmingham bitterly regretted that his son had to go to ‘an all-Asian school’, because thirty years before, when he was a boy, society had been far more mixed. Yet the connection between social isolation and violent extremism is of course far from straightforward. Mohammed Sidique Khan did not come from a fundamentalist community. He once refused to have an arranged marriage because he was in love with the woman who became his wife, Hasina. She was the daughter of Farida Patel, a respected – and culturally liberal – community worker from Dewsbury, south of Leeds, who has been honoured by the Queen. It seems that both families disapproved of the relationship. When I visited the cul-de-sac of neatly kept bungalows in Dewsbury where Hasina once lived with her parents, a neighbour described how the future leader of the London bombers would wait in his car outside her father’s house, like any other teenager.

So how did Sidique Khan become a man prepared to murder his fellow citizens in the name of Allah? There are no simple answers. There are what the Security Services call the ‘push factors’, those forces that make recruits vulnerable to radicalization, as well as ‘pull factors’ from terrorist leaders and radicalizers, both in Britain and abroad. The strongest push factor is the alienation felt by many British Muslims in the country of their birth, the crises of identity, separateness and rejection with which they grapple. Under the influence of propagandists, this unease can be manipulated into a world view in which Islam is perceived to be at war with the secular West and with the kafir, with the unbeliever. From there it is a short step to convincing new recruits that murdering ‘the enemies of Islam’ will be rewarded in the next life. In the words of the radical cleric Abu Hamza, who preached for so long at the Finsbury Park mosque, ‘Killing a kafir who is fighting you is okay. Killing a kufr for any reason, you can say it, it is okay – even if there is no reason for it. If a kufr goes in a Muslim country, he is like a cow, anybody can take him. That is the Islamic law, it is allowed.’

For more than a decade, until the London bombings, Britain was supine in the face of such verbal attacks. Extremist preachers were free to radicalize and recruit the disaffected Muslim youth because it was believed that to admonish them would be equivalent to criticizing a faith, even when they were inciting hatred. The failure of the British government to take robust action served only to strengthen the extremists, who felt increasingly invincible in Britain, and weaken the moderate mainstream Muslims who were too often too slow to denounce the extremists among them.

For many years the wider Muslim community failed to reject unequivocally the extremism being preached in the name of Islam. When I interviewed mosque leaders about the July 7 attacks most conceded that the bombers were ‘criminals’, but they also refused to accept that it was jihadi theology inspired by the Qur’an that had given the bombers the confidence to kill themselves and others. This state of denial is exacerbated by the refusal of many British Muslims to trust the police. And conspiracy theories abound: large numbers of people simply do not believe that Muslims are involved in terrorist plots; they prefer to see the various plots as being part of a wider global anti-Islamic conspiracy, usually involving the Jews.

MI5 continues to infiltrate the British jihadi network and the quality of intelligence appears to be improving. In 2007, forty-two people were convicted of terrorist offences relating to sixteen different operations. Terrorist plots which could have resulted in thousands of deaths have been thwarted. However, even now, groups of extremists who used to be members of al-Muhajiroun, which was disbanded by Omar Bakri Mohammed in October 2004, are organizing meetings across Britain, drawing in the next generation of recruits at clandestine gatherings and rallies. There are as many as 200 indigenous active terrorist cells being monitored by MI5, with 4,000 British Muslims considered to be a threat to national security.

Few within the security services doubt that there will be another muderous terrorist attack in Britain before too long. ‘You’ve got to be lucky every time, we’ve only got to be lucky once,’ say some Islamist extremists I have met, paraphrasing an old IRA slogan. Improving the odds for the police and MI5 crucially depends on persuading the wider Muslim community to come forward with intelligence about extremism. Yet in my experience many people with useful information simply do not trust the police to be discreet, believing extremists are already working as double agents on the inside, or that the police fail to offer sufficient protection to informers. Some police forces, particularly those outside the major urban centres, are unused to gathering intelligence from the Muslim community, as I found out after I interviewed a woman who had wanted to come forward with information.

Ayesha had arrived from the Far East to marry a British Muslim. Her family had chosen the wrong man; her husband turned out to be a leading member of an extremist group. Over the course of a year Ayesha found out that her husband was discussing how to carry out attacks on Britain. She told me she was asked if she would be prepared to wear a suicide vest and to blow herself up. When I interviewed her we went to some lengths to protect her identity, meeting well away from her home and disguising her appearance. Because of the gravity of her allegations we were obliged to inform the police. I explained that her life would be in danger if her identity was revealed, yet in an extraordinary act of recklessness the police force arranged to interview her at her local Muslim community centre, where she was known. Once there, she was persecuted for speaking to the media rather than praised for her bravery in coming forward with important intelligence. Another source was lost on that afternoon, and Ayesha’s life was put in danger.

But I was to find out soon afterwards that there is another, more significant reason why the flow of intelligence to the police and Security Service has been slow: even some of the most respected Muslim leaders refuse to believe that terrorist plots are real.

Recently I visited one of the most senior Muslim leaders in Britain, Dr Mohammed Naseem, chairman of the Birmingham Central Mosque. A practising medical doctor, he has a reputation as a moderate. He organized books of condolence for the victims of the Madrid bombings and for Ken Bigley, the British hostage murdered in Iraq. We arranged to meet at his surgery, not far from the mosque. He invited me to his consulting rooms where a full-sized model of a human skeleton watched over us from one corner of the room. Dr Naseem has been scientifically trained and I expected to be able to have a rational discussion with him about Islam and terrorism. Yet when I asked about the July 7 attacks, he explained that Muslims in Britain were being framed.

I asked him about the video of Mohammed Sidique Khan recorded just before the London bombings and released by al-Qaida after his death, in which, wearing a red and white headdress (a keffiyeh) and occasionally thrusting a pen at the camera, the young jihadist spoke of his willingness to die for Islam in ‘obedience to the one true God, Allah’.

‘The 7/7 video?’ Dr Naseem said. ‘Many youngsters feel they need to find a new identity.’

He paused.

‘I suspect that video is fake.’