The age of assassins

Suicide bombing in the 2000s. London under attack, continued

In the summer of 1998 Farida Patel, a community liaison officer at a school in Dewsbury, became the first British Asian woman to be invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Here she met prime minister Tony Blair, the Queen and Prince Charles, and was honoured for her work with the Muslim community in the Yorkshire town.

A year after Tony Blair’s socially liberal New Labour had come to power, Patel might be seen to represent a new, diverse British society at ease with different religions, living under a state that took pride in the help it provided to minorities.

Farida Patel’s family history reflected the legacy of the British Empire. She came from a family of anti-apartheid activists, her father Ismail having died in 1973 under house arrest by the South African regime, before the family moved to England where she met her husband.

Their daughter Hasina later became a ‘Community Enrichment Officer’, one of the many opaque job titles that arose in order to police Britain’s new-found diversity, working at a school with special needs pupils. In the mid-1990s Hasina had met her husband Mohammad while he was studying for a business degree at Leeds Metropolitan, one of dozens of former polytechnics which had been upgraded to universities in the 1980s.

Mohammad had found employment at a primary school in Leeds as a learning mentor for the children of recently arrived immigrants, and even accompanied them on trips to the House of Commons. He was also involved in a community centre attached to a mosque, where he was a ‘youth outreach worker’; keen to support ‘communities’, the state, in the form of Leeds City Council and the government’s New Opportunity Fund, gave this Hamara Centre £4,000 of taxpayer’s money for its youth programme.

It was at the Hamara - the Urdu for ‘ours’ - that Mohammad Sidique Khan regularly met Shehzad Tanweer, 22, and Hasib Hussain, just 18, both of whom looked up to the 30-year-old as a ‘father figure’. They played football with him as part of a youth project, and they would also join him in his mission to bring war to Britain, killing 52 innocent people in London.

The suicide bombings, the first on British soil, woke the public up to some startling truths; not only the existence of homegrown terrorists, but a larger and deeper problem of alienation among young Muslim men who were easy prey for extremists offering certainty. This would become ever more apparent after the release of Khan’s martyrdom video in which, dressed in the fatigues of an Islamic militant, he spoke in an incongruous Yorkshire accent, warning darkly that ‘Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.’

The terror would not end on July 7. Two weeks later, as forensics experts on the Piccadilly Line cleared the last of the debris and held a moment’s prayers for the victims, four young men from east Africa pressed their detonators on the Underground and bus network. Despite the failure of the second attacks, the atmosphere had become extremely jittery, and there was a fear that suicide bombing, so common in Iraq and in the Holy Land, would become a feature of life in Britain.