7/7 bombs show homegrown threat to Europe

BERLIN: Some 12 hours before he blew himself up on the London underground, Shehzad Tanweer was playing cricket until late evening in a park in northern England.

“He appeared perfectly normal to those around him,” said a government report on the London attacks of July 2005, in which four young, apparently unremarkable British Muslim men killed 52 people in Western Europe’s first suicide bombings. Tanweer’s last cricket game is one small detail that hints at the enormity of the challenge facing European security services one year later — how to spot the “homegrown” militant who betrays no outward sign of hostile or erratic behaviour.

“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Peter Waldmann of the University of Augsburg in Germany, one of a panel of terrorism experts whom the EU has consulted on the issue of Islamist radicalisation and recruitment.

As the British government report made clear, there is no single type of militant personality. Some recruits have been poor, but some affluent, some ill-educated but others from prestigious schools, some with criminal records but others ‘clean’, some single but others with partners and children. For Waldmann, a key stage in radicalisation is the point at which the militant travels abroad and creates both physical and symbolic distance from home.

“To carry out a terrorist attack on a country, you have to really hate it ... You suddenly see things through a different lens.” In the case of the London bombings, two of the plotters visited Pakistan between November 2004 and February 2005, and the group maintained contact with one or more individuals there in the run-up to the July 7 attacks.

That has prompted other countries to reassess the threat from angry, disenchanted sons and grandsons of Muslims who may have lived in Europe for decades but in many cases have never fully integrated into Western societies.