7/7 bombers planned to kill Oz, English players

LONDON: The suicide bombers who perpetrated the July 7, 2005, London blasts were initially told to kill the English and Australian cricket teams.

According to a report in the UK’s Sunday Times, a family friend of Hasib Hussain — one of the bombers, who killed 13 people on a London bus — made these astonishing revelations to police.

The friend, who uses the pseudonym Ahmed Hafiz, said bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer received the orders at a training camp near Kotli in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in December 2004.

According to Hafiz, the bombers were told to get jobs as stewards during the Ashes Test in 2005 at Edgbaston, Birmingham, and spray sarin gas in the changing rooms. The orders came from al-Qaeda, Hafiz said.

Tanweer apparently objected to the plot, possibly because he enjoyed watching the game and played it himself. Hafiz said Khan and Tanweer argued over the decision. “Tanweer and Khan ended up in a deadlock, and the fight had to be broken up by the chaperone,” Hafiz told police.

A few days later, the camp’s commanders, who, Hafiz claimed, were al-Qaeda militants, told them to bomb the London Underground instead. “It was always there as Plan B,” Hafiz said.

The Anti-Terror Squads were aware that two bombers had visited Pakistan in November 2004, but they didn’t know which camps they had attended. The details provided by Hafiz, who claims to be a family friend of the Hussains for over 25 years, may help investigators put the pieces together.

“We know Khan and Tanweer went to Pakistan,” an anti-terrorist officer told the Sunday Times. “Our understanding is that Khan was helped by sources in Leeds.” For his part, Hafiz has claimed that the camp commanders put the two bombers in touch with a bomb-making expert in Birmingham.

Last week, the newspaper reported Kotli locals saying that all training camps in the region had been suspended since autumn of 2004 under pressure from the ISI, but that militants were still in the area in safe houses.

Khan, ringleader of the 7/7 plot, reportedly became a suicide bomber after the death of his friend, Omar Sharif, the Derby-based terrorist who tried to blow himself up in Tel Aviv in 2003. “That was the turning point for Khan,” said Hafiz. “He felt angry and changed from being a cheerleader of jihad to one of those active.”

Khan is said to have first visited the Kashmir camp in 2003 on his own after being introduced by an Imam in Leeds. Neither police nor the security services know of this imam.