LONDON — A Pakistani official said yesterday that three of the four London suicide bombers traveled to the southern city of Karachi last year, and investigators searched for clues in the northern British town of Leeds, where some of the attackers lived.
Authorities in Pakistan were trying to determine whether extremists in that country aided in the July 7 attacks, which killed 56 persons, including the bombers.
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government, meanwhile, reacted sharply to a report by two leading think tanks that said Britain’s close alliance with the United States in the Iraq war has put it at particular risk of terrorist attack.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Economic and Social Research Council said the situation in Iraq had given “a boost to the al-Qaeda network’s propaganda, recruitment and fundraising” and provided an ideal training ground for al Qaeda-linked terrorists.
“The terrorists have struck across the world, in countries allied with the United States, backing the war in Iraq and in countries which had nothing whatever to do with the war in Iraq,” Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said in Brussels.
British Defense Secretary John Reid said terrorism had to be confronted.
“The idea that somehow by running away from the school bully, then the bully will not come after you is a thesis that is known to be completely untrue by every kid in the playground, and it is also refuted by every piece of historical evidence that we have,” Mr. Reid said in a BBC radio interview.
Three of the bombers traveled to Karachi in southern Pakistan last year, but their purpose remains unclear, said Shahid Hayyat, a deputy director at the country’s Federal Investigation Agency.
Suicide-bomber Hasib Hussain, 18, arrived in July 2004 aboard a Saudi airliner. Shahzad Tanweer, 22, and Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, arrived Nov. 19 aboard a Turkish Airlines flight and returned to London in February 2005, Mr. Hayyat told the Associated Press yesterday.
He said he did not know what the men did during their visit.
Karachi, a transit hub for travelers to Pakistan, is the country’s commercial capital and largest city with a population of 15 million. The metropolis has been the scene of several terrorist attacks against foreigners, as well as minority Shi’ite Muslims and Christians. Security officials in Karachi have arrested several al Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was caught after a shootout in September 2002.
Pakistani intelligence officials have said Tanweer briefly stayed at a religious school in Lahore and met with a member of an outlawed domestic militant group. Pakistani intelligence agents have questioned students, teachers and administrators at the school and at least two other al-Qaeda-linked radical Islamic centers.
Tanweer, Khan and Hussain, who were all from the Leeds area, were born in Britain to Pakistani immigrants. The fourth bomber, 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay, came to Britain from Jamaica as an infant and lived in Luton, north of London.
In Leeds yesterday, police searched an Islamic book shop, the Iqra Learning Center, for a fourth straight day.
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