LONDON – By the time President Bush declared war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks, a network of radical Muslims already was firmly ensconced in London and around Europe, according to security analysts and members of Britain’s Muslim community.
The radicals’ mission and motive were already established. Their methods and skills had been honed. The threat of an attack in Europe after Sept. 11 was well known.
Muslim scholars said the war on terrorism probably did little to sway Europe’s radical Muslims from their mission, although the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq might have increased their resolve to carry out attacks such as those in London on Thursday and the March 11, 2004, bombings around Madrid that killed 191 people.
Authorities had not determined who was responsible for the bombings, but British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Thursday’s attacks bore “all the hallmarks” of al-Qaida.
Security analysts noted that all of the ingredients were in place for such a strike to occur. With the Group of Eight summit under way in Scotland, much of Britain’s security apparatus had shifted from London to focus on protecting the world’s most powerful leaders.
London, meanwhile, was still deep in celebrations after learning Wednesday that it will host the 2012 Summer Olympics. The city clearly had let its guard down, analysts said.
“The bombings in London appear to further confirm the argument that Europe is now one of the foremost “fields of jihad’ for radical Islamists,” said Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Britain’s top police officials had warned for more than a year that a major attack was virtually inevitable in London. The British capital is simply too large, its transportation network too vast and its population too diverse for authorities to identify, monitor and stop the myriad groups capable of carrying out such attacks.
But there has never been any question that those groups existed, that they were well organized and were preparing to strike.
In April 2004, barely a month after the bombings in Madrid, British police arrested 18 Muslim men in and around London on suspicion of planning massive bomb attacks. They confiscated 1,200 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the same substance used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Greatest concern
In discussing London’s vulnerabilities, British security officials repeatedly had said their greatest concern was the subway system, where three of the four bombs exploded Thursday.
Security analysts say Europe appears to have been infiltrated by radical offshoot groups linked to al-Qaida, but which operate with relative autonomy in secretive, small cells.
“It remains to be seen whether those responsible for … (Thursday’s) attacks are militants homegrown in Britain or include returnees from the fighting in Iraq,” Benjamin said in a statement. “But at first glance, the multiple coordinated attacks against mass transit using, it seems, fairly simple technology suggests that the operatives are members of a new generation of terrorists – as in Madrid – and not from the ranks of the highly sophisticated members of the core al-Qaida.”
British police have maintained close surveillance of several suspected groups and last year arrested a radical cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri, thought to have been behind the planning of attacks.
Another group, al-Muhajiroun, was placed under such tight surveillance that its leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, decided to disband its membership last year.
The presence of such groups has been well-publicized and widely accepted in Britain and the rest of Europe for years, analysts said.
“The threat has been within their borders for years. … In places like the Middle East and Western Europe, they’re unfortunately used to the presence of terrorists and terrorist attacks,” said Gerry Leone, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Richard Reid, the airline passenger who attempted to explode a bomb hidden in his shoe.
George Galloway, an independent member of Parliament from east London, described Thursday’s attack as “despicable but not remotely unpredictable,” given the known activities of Muslim radicals in London.
Feeding anger
Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, said the ongoing British and U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is feeding the anger of many Muslims around the world. Rather than discouraging acts of violence, he said, the war on terrorism appears to be inspiring the radical movement.
“I’m afraid this may not be the last of it as long as British government policy has not changed,” Tamimi said.
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