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DERBY (England): Born in the British Midlands town of Derby, Muhammed Akhtar is too scared to say he is a Muslim for fear of being branded a suicide bomber or even attacked.
He feels the involvement of British Muslims in guerrilla attacks internationally since the September 11, 2001 attacks on US cities, has tarnished the image of the religion.
“Young Muslims in particular are too afraid to say who they are because they don’t want to be associated with these terrorists,” said Akhtar, 28.
He grew up in the same neighbourhood as Omar Khan Sharif, accused by Israel of aiding suicide bomber Asif Hanif, another Briton, who blew himself up killing three Israelis at a Tel Aviv nightclub on May 1.
Sharif’s involvement in the first attack by a foreign suicide bomber since a Palestinian uprising began in September 2000 brought international attention to Derby.
The Israeli authorities said Hanif’s co-conspirator Sharif ran away when his bomb failed to detonate. His body was later found on a nearby beach.
Sharif lived in a small, predominantly Muslim area of Derby in central England, where cafe owners say Qibla, the alternative to Coca-Cola, is the best-selling drink.
NEGATIVE IMAGE: Derby’s Muslims resent the negative image Sharif has given their community.
Jovid Ali Madad said he left his native Afghanistan to escape violence and extremism and was shocked to hear a fellow Derby Muslim implicated in a suicide bomb attack.
“I don’t want to see more terrorism here. No one deserves to be killed; it makes people think all Muslims are bad,” said Madad, a 27-year-old student.
Nearby the owner of a bookshop said his business almost went bankrupt and he received threatening phone calls after police raided the flat above the premises.
Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain said that 45 per cent of British non-Muslims it had polled viewed Muslims with increased suspicion since the Sept 11 attacks, and desecration of mosques and cemeteries was now frequent.
He blamed militant clerics like Abu Hamza al-Masri based in London, who applauded the Sept 11 attacks, and the radical al-Muhajiroun group, active in Derby, for increasing fear and animosity towards British Muslims.
“These minority groups make Muslims come across as mindless fanatics,” he said. “They get much more media attention than their representation in society warrants.”
Bunglawala said there were at least 1.6 million Muslims in Britain, and al-Muhajiroun had only 1,000 members.
RECRUITING CENTRE: The involvement of British citizens in militant attacks has given rise to concerns that the country has become a recruiting ground for extremists.
Several Britons travelled to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban two years ago. A number are still detained in the US prison Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
British citizen Richard Reid tried to detonate a bomb stuffed in his shoe onboard a trans-Atlantic American Airlines flight in 2001 and last year London-educated
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was sentenced to death in Pakistan for the kidnap and murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl.
A spokesman for Al-Muhajiroun, Anjem Choudhary, said a revolution was taking place in the British Muslim community.
“To number us at about a couple of thousand strong would be to underestimate us,” he said. “There’s not one mosque in the country that has not heard of us.”
The group encourages Muslims to travel abroad for “jihad”, or holy war.
The British authorities have detained about 300 suspected militants and charged about 40 with terrorism-related offences since 2001, said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence in St Andrews, Scotland.
“This is a large number of individuals,” Ranstorp said. “It does seem to imply Britain has been made a bit of a magnet for these people.”
Ranstorp said the charges were extremely difficult to prove in Britain.
“But British authorities are still working effectively if quietly behind the scenes with less legislative powers at their disposal than for example France,” he said.—Reuters
