LONDON, July 13: British authorities said on Wednesday they were hunting for the masterminds of last week’s bombings in London as Britons reeled in shock over news that the attacks were apparently carried out by four British-born men of Pakistan origin.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who is visiting Brussels to confer with his European Union counterparts, said the police were now hunting for accomplices of the bombers who he said decided ‘to blow themselves up’.

Police however have yet to say explicitly that all four attacks were carried out by suicide bombers.

In an interview with BBC Radio, Mr Clarke said ‘we have to attack the people who are driving, organizing and manipulating those people’ who carried out the bombings in the British capital.

The revelation that the bombers might be born-and-bred Britons sparked a bout of national soul-searching in the press.

“Suicide bombers from suburbia”, screamed the banner headline in the Daily Mail above a photograph of police vans standing on a street of ordinary-looking terraced houses in Leeds, where police raided several homes on Tuesday.

“The conclusion that the terrorists were home-grown is deeply unsettling. It does not, in any way, close this case,” The Times said in an editorial. “Is it really possible that no one beyond the bombers had any inkling of their intentions?” it asked.

The Guardian, for its part, described news that the bombers were British as ‘the worst of all possible outcomes. ... It will have been the work of people brought up in our multi-racial society of which policy-makers were rightly proud. This is not just a challenge for government but for civic society, too’.

None of the four was in the files of the security services, papers said.

Reports of the identities of the bombers emerged after the police raids in Leeds.

Several newspapers named two of the dead suspected bombers as Hasib Hussein, 19, and 22-year-old Shehzad Tanweer, who lived in Leeds.

The Daily Mail said Mr Hussein carried the bomb that exploded on a packed double-decker bus in central London, while Mr Tanweer detonated a device on the London Underground near Edgware Road station, to the west of the city.

A friend of Mr Tanweer told the ITV news channel that his friend had been in Afghanistan and Pakistan with a group of men as recently as six months ago.

The Daily Mail named 30-year-old father of one Mohammed Sadique Khan, also from Leeds, as having been responsible for another subway blast near Aldgate station, just east of the city centre.

The Independent newspaper, however, identified the Edgware Road attacker as Eliaz Fiaz, 30, from Dewsbury, a town near Leeds.

All the reports, which cited a variety of intelligence and police sources, said the bombers travelled to London’s central King’s Cross station together by commuter train from Luton. —AFP