Bombing suspect symbol of angry young generation?

LEEDS, England — He was the British-born son of a Pakistani merchant who made good in that most British of endeavors: the fish-and-chip business.

But at some point, Shahzad Tanweer, a suspected suicide bomber in a blast that tore apart an Underground carriage in London last week, may have been consumed by the rage of a new and restive generation of Islamic extremists in Europe.

Police said yesterday Tanweer was one of four men from central England who probably planted the bombs that rocked London's transit system last week, killing at least 52 people and wounding 700. All may have died in the explosions, British police said yesterday.

Police raided several homes in the West Yorkshire area near the city of Leeds, which in recent years has become known for the growth of radical Islam.

As they watched soldiers, police and journalists invade their streets, some young neighbors seethed.

Neighbors described Tanweer, said to be 22 or 23, as a boy who loved sports: playing soccer in the street or in the park down the road, riding in his car and lifting weights and working out at a local community center. Friends said he had graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in sports and wasn't overtly religious.

A young woman who said she had known Tanweer and his sisters all her life found it hard to reconcile the youth she knew with the man who police believe blew himself up on a crowded train.

Asked whether she thought he might have committed such an act, the woman, who wouldn't give her name, said, "No, I don't think, but then again. ... No, I don't think so."

The attack caught British anti-terror officials off-guard, but the profile and provenance of the suspects did not.

In recent years, British security services have grown increasingly worried about a unique homegrown threat, anti-terror officials say: second- and third-generation youths from the Pakistani immigrant communities that dominate Britain's Muslim population.

In addition to the notorious Arab ideologues and jihadis who brazenly made London their headquarters for years, British intelligence have stepped up efforts to monitor the cities of Yorkshire and other northern areas where they saw virulent extremism taking root more quietly but steadily.

The suspected bombers slipped by the country's defenses because they manifested a variation on a theme recurring from Paris to Milan to Amsterdam: youthful, inexperienced extremists from seemingly well-integrated families who radicalize fast and seem to strike out of nowhere.

"It's the worst-case scenario," a British law-enforcement official said.

The neighborhoods raided in and around this gritty former textile city in West Yorkshire are not the pretty England of postcards. Although called suburbs, there is little greenery, and some homes are in obvious need of repairs.

Tanweer's stuccoed, semi-detached house on Colwyn Street in the Beeston section of Leeds is a cookie-cutter match to others on the street, slightly peeling and run-down. As police in fluorescent green jackets and tall, black bobby hats stood impassively behind the police tape stretched across the street, neighbors edged on their doorsteps to watch with worried frowns.

The neighborhood of working-class families is a mix of races, religions and nationalities — with Pakistanis, whites, Africans and Hindus living closely together.

The Tanweers, Pakistani-British who moved to the Colwyn Street address at least 20 years ago, were considered a success by local standards. Mumtaz Tanweer owned the South Leeds Fishery, a neat fish-and-chip shop painted in black and green just up Temple Road, and one or two other businesses. He had bought his house and the one directly behind it for his extended family, raising Shahzad, a younger brother and two daughters.

Almost all the young Asian men in the neighborhood shun the markers of Islam to dress in T-shirts and jeans.

Mohamed Ali, 24, working in a community center on an adjoining street, said he had known Tanweer distantly and they had lifted weights in the same gym. Asked how the bombers might have been persuaded to carry out the attacks, he said: "They must have been brainwashed. They all seem sensible and then they fall into a wrong crowd."

He said the local Muslim preachers weren't extremist, but "you may get the odd individual."

"Whoever did this thing should be punished," said Ijaz Hussein, a leader at the Kashmir Muslims Welfare Association, referring to the attacks. "The majority of the community understands what is right."