LONDON, Sept 2: A message from the grave left by one of the four London bombers fuelled a row on Friday over whether Britain’s military role in Iraq has increased the threat of terrorist attacks here.
The comments, aired in an Al Qaeda video on Thursday night that claimed credit for the July 7 suicide bombings, came at a bad time for British Prime Minister Tony Blair who has just returned from a long summer vacation.
Blair, who has repeatedly played down any link between the London attacks and his decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq, declined to say anything about the video before he delivered a first post-holiday speech.
In footage on the Arabic television station Al-Jazeera, a man identified as Mohammad Sidique Khan told viewers that Western atrocities against Muslims drove him to bomb a London Underground train.
Speaking in English with a northern accent, Khan, 30, who police have identified as one of the attackers, said: “Your democratically elected governments continue to commit atrocities against my people over the world.
“Their support makes you directly responsible just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim bothers and sisters.
“Until we feel security you will be our targets. Until you stop the bombing, the gassing, the imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight.”
The video, accompanied by a separate message by Al Qaeda’s number two Ayman al Zawahiri, was the first time one of the bombers has been heard explaining the rationale for the July 7 attacks on three subways train and a bus that left 56 people dead in Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity.
Responding to the footage, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said there was “no excuse, no justification for terrorism”.
Speaking to reporters at an informal EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Wales, Straw said he had seen the video, aired Thursday on Al-Jazeera television, and that the security services were assessing its contents.
“Those who entirely wrongly claim to speak in the name of Islam are mainly killing their fellow Muslims,” he added.
Khan’s words triggered an emotional response from Muslim leaders in Britain and the friends and relatives of those affected by the bombings.
One of his friends, Irshad Hussain, said the film horrified him.
Hussain, who is in his 50s and lived near Khan, said: “We are all shocked and horrified when we saw the video itself. We are just devastated for what we had just heard and what we had seen on TV.”
Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, rejected the dead bomber’s logic for justifying the attack.
“Nothing can ever justify committing acts of terrorism against innocent civilians,” he told BBC radio.
At the same time, he noted: “One thing it (the video) does show, is that it does serve to confirm that the war in Iraq and our policies in the Middle East have indeed led to a radicalization amongst a section of Muslim youth.”
Eric Joyce, a member of parliament for Blair’s governing Labour Party, however said he believed toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do, and insisted that London had faced a terrorist threat before the March 2003 war. “I think Al-Qaeda and similar organisations across the world were motivated by something much deeper, much more nihilistic than Iraq specifically,” Joyce told BBC Radio.—AFP