Pakistan probes London bomber link to school

The revelations came as President General Pervez Musharraf urged authorities to root out extremism from his country, confiscate material that preaches hate, ban extremist groups from gathering and stop radical religious groups from collecting money for their causes.

“We owe it to our future generations to rid the country of the malaise of extremism,” Musharraf told law enforcement officials during a ceremony in Rawalpindi, near the capital, Islamabad.

He stressed that the move was not anti-Islamic, but aimed at taking Pakistan forward “as a modern, dynamic, progressive, forward-looking Islamic state”.

One of the intelligence officials said that while in Pakistan, Tanweer is believed to have visited a radical religious school run by the Sunni Muslim militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a group banned by Musharraf for alleged links to a 2001 attack on India’s Parliament.

“He only is believed to have spent four or five days there,” the official said.

The sprawling school in Muridke, 20 miles north of the eastern city of Lahore, has a reputation for hostility, but journalists who travelled there today were allowed to enter.

Two sentries with assault rifles stood at the main gate.

Mohammed Azam, who is in charge of the 60-acre complex – called Markaz Taiba - denied Tanweer had ever come to the site, which includes a mosque, religious school, housing and farmland.

“This is a pack of lies,” he said. “They want to malign Islam. They want to target the religion of Islam and Muslims.”

The intelligence official would not say when Tanweer is believed to have visited the school, but he disputed reports that he studied there. The short nature of the visit could indicate that Tanweer went to meet someone or get instructions.

Tanweer’s uncle, Bashir Ahmed, said from England that his nephew travelled to Lahore, Pakistan, earlier this year to study Islam.

But the officials said they believed he also made a trip in the latter half of 2004, in which he met with Osama Nazir, a Pakistani militant arrested in November 2004 for helping plan a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad that killed five people, including two Americans, in March 2002.

Meanwhile, Osama Nazir, a member of the al Qaida-linked Sunni militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, told authorities from jail that he met with Tanweer last year in Faisalabad, 75 miles south-west of Lahore, before his November arrest for involvement in the church attack.

It was not clear what the men discussed, or whether there was any connection between that meeting and the July 7 attacks in London.

Three of the four suicide bomb suspects – Tanweer, 18-year-old Hasib Hussain, and 30-year-old Mohammed Saddiq Khan – were Britons of Pakistani descent. Reports say the fourth suspected attacker was Jamaican-born Lindsey Germaine.

The Times said investigators believe a Pakistani Briton in his 30s with possible links to al Qaida may have orchestrated the attacks. They believe he arrived in Britain last month and left just ahead of the bombings, the newspaper said.

It reported that the man, whom it did not identify, was thought to have chosen the targets.

In London, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair confirmed police believed they would discover an al Qaida connection to the July 7 blasts that killed 54 people, including the four suspected bombers.

“What we expect to find at some stage is that there is a clear al Qaida link, a clear al Qaida approach, because the four men who are dead, who we believe are the bombers, are in the category of foot soldiers,” Blair told the BBC.

Both Pakistani intelligence officials said the Interior Ministry has provided photos and profiles of the suspected London bombers to intelligence agencies to help them determine whether they have any links to al Qaida suspects already in custody.