LONDON, July 20: Western foreign policy has fuelled the Muslim radicalism behind the bomb attacks which killed more than 50 people in London, the British capital’s Mayor Ken Livingstone said on Wednesday.

Livingstone, who earned the nickname “Red Ken” for his left-wing views, won widespread praise for a defiant response which helped unite London after the bombings. But he has revived his reputation for courting controversy in recent days.

Asked on Wednesday what he thought had motivated the four suicide bombers, Livingstone cited Western policy in the Middle East and early American backing for Osama bin Laden.

“A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in (US detention camp) Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn’t a just foreign policy,” he said.

Police say they believe there is a clear link between Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network and the four British Muslims who blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus on July 7.

“You’ve just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil. We’ve propped up unsavoury governments, we’ve overthrown ones that we didn’t consider sympathetic,” Livingstone said.

“I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of Afghanistan.

“They didn’t give any thought to the fact that once he’d done that, he might turn on his creators,” he told BBC radio.

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has claimed the bombings have no link to its foreign policy, particularly its decision to invade Iraq alongside the United States.

But an opinion poll this week showed two-thirds of Britons see a connection between the Iraq war and the bombings. —Reuters