At 8.55 on the morning of 7 July 2005, Hasib Hussain, an 18-year old from Beeston, near Leeds, phoned three friends to whom he had said goodbye half an hour earlier in front of Boots at King"s Cross station. He got no reply, but left a few messages anyway. "I can"t get on the Tube, what should I do?" he asked. Five minutes before Hussain placed the calls, his three friends had detonated simultaneous bombs, killing themselves and 39 others, on the London underground.
A little later Hussain boarded a No 30 bus, taking a seat on the top deck. He sat there for 20 minutes as the bus edged its way through the chaotic traffic, fiddling with a rucksack at his feet. When the bus reached Tavistock Square, Hussain - possibly mistaking an approaching traffic warden for a policeman - detonated his bomb, killing himself and 13 passengers. Dozens more were injured .
No one will ever know what was going through Hussain"s mind in the last minutes of his life. Some witnesses say they heard him scream just before he triggered his explosive device. Others say the young man made no sound. One of the last images of Hasib Hussain is from a surveillance camera at King"s Cross station concourse, which shows the four bombers together at 8.26am, half an hour before the first explosions. They appear no different from any other group of young men at a station during rush hour.
The twin images, of the young men swiftly saying goodbye at the station, and of the shredded bus, with its top deck peeled back by the blast, have become iconic, summing up both the new terrorism that is striking the UK and the apparent banality of the men who perpetrate it.
Britain has seen a succession of such events over the past six years. From an attempt by a 28-year-old from the nondescript London suburb of Bromley to down a transatlantic jet in late 2001 to the abortive attacks in Glasgow and London last summer, barely a month has passed without arrests or a scare. Once it was thought those responsible were foreign terrorists sent from overseas. Over the past few years it has become obvious that the majority are young British-born men.
What is happening? What are the processes that led these young people to commit such acts? Were they recruited and brainwashed? Did they seek out the means to realise their dreams of violence? What, in short, are the roots of radicalisation?
To find the answers to these questions, The Observer Magazine has spoken to scores of Whitehall officials, intelligence officers whose daily work is the struggle against terrorism, former militants in the UK and abroad, convicted prisoners, police officers, experts and psychiatrists, defence and prosecution lawyers, Islamic religious figures, Muslim community leaders, youth workers and ordinary people. We have analysed hundreds of pages of court documents and secret intelligence reports. We have also compiled and analysed profiles of more than 50 British militants, cross-referencing our results with similar surveys of 300 other such individuals in other countries.
This investigation overturned several myths. The average age of UK militants is 29 years old - higher than often thought, indicating a greater degree of maturity and less chance of "brainwashing". The role of "preachers of hate" appears far less important than conventional wisdom suggests. Security service specialists stress instead that if there is anyone who provides a spark for ultimate radicalisation, it is usually someone only a year or so older than the potential militant, someone who is often already a friend or a family member.
Equally, the idea that militants are radicalised in "extremist mosques" appears exaggerated. Government analysis now indicates that less than 10 per cent of radical activity occurs in places of worship .
Nor is poverty apparently a factor, at least not directly. Fewer than 20 per cent of UK militants came from genuinely deprived or low-income backgrounds. Militants are not "lone wolves" either, as sometimes imagined. A third of those we studied were married and around a quarter had children.
And the idea that most militants are highly educated needs qualification. More than a third had a university degree or similar qualification and a high proportion were studying when they became involved in radicalism, usually in technical and science faculties, particularly engineering or IT. But 10 per cent had left school at 16, another 15 per cent had dropped out of further education, and few of those who were at college were at major institutions. A significant proportion in the UK did, however, have a criminal record , often with convictions for offences unrelated to any radicalism.
What does prove critical is the influence of propaganda - or at least emotive images from the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere. This was constantly referred to in court testimony, by expert witnesses , militants and former militants themselves. Here, the impact of images in mainstream media appears as important as classic terrorist propaganda, or indeed more general hardline religious literature. One security source told us that "the News at Ten has as much impact as anything al-Qaeda make".
Our investigation also exposed profound social and cultural problems at the heart of Britain"s Muslim community and significant identity issues. One security source spoke of how a defendant in a recent terrorism trial described supporting England at football and Pakistan at cricket. "It is in that tension that everything is playing out," says the source. "It"s all about how the global plugs into the local, about the interaction of what happens personally to an individual and the world geopolitical trends to which they are exposed."
What also became clear was the speed at which radicalisation can happen. It is commonly thought that it takes several months or even years for the various factors that lead to profound radicalisation to have an effect on an individual. In fact, the process can happen much more rapidly if all the necessary factors occur simultaneously. Going from a relatively ordinary existence to being a suicide bomber can, in some circumstances, take just weeks. The current record, joked one European intelligence chief bleakly, is held by a Belgian teenager who "went from a normal kid to being genuinely committed to suicide bombing" in three weeks, without contact with anyone else other than via the internet.
It is this process, rapid or otherwise, that we investigate below.
Mohammed and Ahmed, 17 and 19 respectively, are standing at a grubby bus stop on a high street in east London. It is early on a Friday evening and they are talking about what to do later. The options are limited: play pool, hang about the estate, smoke some cannabis, watch DVDs, go for a drive in a friend"s not-exactly stolen car. They have not been to Friday prayers at the local mosque for a long time, since they stopped going with their fathers - "too much hassle, too many old men". And they like a drink. Mohammed, who is wearing a fake gold necklace with the traditional Muslim hand of Fatima dangling from it, says his interests are "films, music and cars". "And girls," adds Ahmed.
Both men have been to Pakistan, to the Mirpur area of southern Kashmir, from where their parents, like most British Pakistani migrants, came 35 years ago. They did not like it much. "Too hot and the food was rubbish and everything was dirty," says Mohammed. Ahmed says he had diarrhoea all the time he was there. "Came back two stone lighter," he jokes. As for politics, "It"s all lies," says Mohammed. "No comment.
So what might turn Ahmed and Mohammed into suicide bombers? British intelligence analysts now talk of "push factors" - those that make an individual more susceptible to radicalisation - and "pull" factors - the actions of a recruiting agent that encourage someone towards violent activism. Analysts believe that many push factors are linked to the kind of identity problems common to second or third-generation immigrants. Similar problems, of course, occur in many immigrant communities. Analysts speak of the "30-year rule", which says that there will be violence associated with a community three decades after their arrival in the UK - the Jews in the Thirties, the Afro-Caribbean population in the Seventies and Eighties. Clearly the current violence is of a different nature. The security services and police in the UK are concerned that the Bangladeshi community may be the next to experience the phenomenon.
Many "push factors" are rooted in resentment . "A personal brush with racism is often very important," says one security source, but others are almost banal, and include "a failure in a job, [or] a failure to live up to expectations, either one"s own or one"s family"s."
There are also factors rooted in tensions within the British Muslim community. Ed Husain, who once held a senior position in Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist organisation which has faced constant calls to be banned in the UK, told The Observer Magazine that as a teenager he had become increasingly distant from his family, who were steeped in the religious and social customs of Pakistan. Husain, a self confessed "misfit" at school, started seeking alternatives, particularly the more modern, more politicised strands of Islam. He soon found himself at the centre of the tension between the old systems of religious observance imported by first generation migrants, which see politics as something to be shunned, and newer styles of worship, often heavily influenced by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which adopt an aggressively political stance and are boosted by a massive propaganda campaign. The latter, Husain says, "seemed more relevant, more contemporary. They answered my questions."
Other catalysts may be arguments over choices of partner, nightlife, drinking or using soft drugs. Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the 7/7 bombers, became involved in radical Islam in his home town of Beeston, West Yorkshire, around the time his parents tried to force him to leave a girl he was in love with and marry a girl they had chosen. One of the primary ways in which the group of local hardliners who formed around Khan attracted new recruits was by offering to conduct marriages that were outlawed by the traditional community.
But the critical element is the interaction of the "push" and "pull" factors. Often the two are impossible to distinguish, as in the case of Shiraz Maher. Like Ed Husain, Maher also spent many years at the heart of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Now rejecting the hardline ideology he once followed, Maher, 26, has no doubt where his involvement could have led. "It could be compared to using soft drugs," he says. "Most people who smoke cannabis don"t go on to harder drugs, but it allows you to enter a world of criminality that can lead eventually to addiction or dealing harder drugs. This is the same." Hizb ut-Tahrir officials deny the charge, saying that in fact they divert potential militants from violence.
Maher was a history student at Leeds University on 9/11, and had not been attracted to any kind of activism before the attack on the US. His family had never been observant, and he drank, smoked and "was a normal first-year student". But the 9/11 attacks "forced a choice", Maher now says. "The rules of the game were clearly changing. You had to decide where you stood. I suddenly started asking questions I had never asked before about Islam, about my identity, about the world."
If the push factors were there, the pull factors did not take long to arrive. A few days after the attacks in New York and Washington, outside the mosque, Maher was approached by a Hizb ut-Tahrir activist. The man, an Arabic and politics graduate from Maher"s own Leeds University, was just a few years older, knew the Koran by heart, but wore a suit and was clean-shaven. He "seemed to have the answers" to the questions that Maher was now asking: "I thought, here is someone who is successful and who talks my language."
That language was "the single narrative" - the global explanation for all the ills that underpin almost all Islamic militant thought. "The single narrative says that Muslims are under attack all over the world from the West and its allies, and that it is every Muslim"s duty to protect them by fighting back," explains one foreign office source. "It is the oil that allows the radicalisation machine"s many cogs to turn. It is the biggest single threat there is, because it legitimises virtually any action."
The single narrative, like some secular political ideologies, exposes "the problem" and, crucially, offers a programme, a strategy and a solution. And it is widespread. Ahmed and Mohammed on the street corner in Walthamstow are both convinced the 9/11 attacks were the work of the Israeli secret service and that the 7/7 attacks in London were "probably" a British government plot aimed at facilitating the "global repression of Muslims". "There"s an agenda against Muslims. They do not want us to be strong. They want to keep us down, keep us poor, humiliate us, they call us terrorists but they are terrorists, too."
This new global Islamic identity - which does not necessarily co-exist easily with national identities - is critical. According to Scott Atran, an American academic who has studied suicide bombers in Morocco, Spain and Israel-Palestine, and has recently completed a major study of their motives: "those who are humiliated themselves do not become actors". Instead, Atran said, "the strongest effect is on those who feel themselves responsible for those who are being humiliated." Court testimony from recent trials of alleged terrorists in the UK is full of defendants claiming they "had to act" to protect other Muslims, who were "suffering".
If a recruiting agent finds the right subject, rapid progress can be made. Shiraz Maher was seeing his mentor two or three times a week within months of their first meeting. As is typical of recruiters, the older man led rather than dragged his target in a certain direction. "I felt he understood me," says Maher. "When I said I"ve been clubbing, I"ve smoked some weed, he was cool. At a traditional mosque in the Pakistani community [in Britain] they would have told me I was going to hell, but he just said, "If it wasn"t fun people wouldn"t do it" and suggested there were more rewarding and important things in life."
Equally typically, none of the conversations between Maher and his recruiter took place in mosques. All the major terrorist plots in the UK and elsewhere (from the Madrid attacks of 2004 and even the 9/11 hijackers) have taken shape in zones that are outside traditional established authority, religious or secular.
And, again typically, Maher was, at the time of his recruitment, profoundly ignorant of Islam. He went on to spend four years in the group, recruiting scores of activists and trying, unsuccessfully, to recruit the two men who attacked Glasgow airport, and who are believed to have planted two massive but defective bombs in London last year.
Husain and Maher"s respective routes into radical activism show many common elements, but are atypical in one important aspect: both men were, at least in part, radicalised within a large organisation. Most militants in the UK have never been part of any other group. They are, in fact, "self-starters".
Security services in the UK and elsewhere have made enormous efforts to analyse and profile militants. One of their major problems is the immense variety of factors that lead young British Muslim men into militancy. Despite this, analysts informally group the activists into categories. There are the "followers", people who are vulnerable to the right approach at the right moment, particularly if they are already partly radicalised by "news from overseas", or a particular event that makes them question their identity or their own cultural background for the first time. Then there are the "seekers", those who actively go looking for people with authority, knowledge and the crucial contacts, such as the 18-year-old schoolboy who became attracted to radical Islam and then got in touch, via the internet, with a group of students at Bradford University who were planning trips to training camps in Pakistan.
Then there are the "do-ers" or the "selfstarters", who are perhaps the most dangerous of all. One "self-starter" is a successful small businessman in his forties who now runs a youth club aimed at preventing young men from becoming radicalised or getting involved with gangs. Born in Britain, and never particularly bothered about politics, he had nonetheless followed the typical path - moving from the traditional Barelvi Islam of his Pakistani forefathers to Saudistyle Salafi conservatism. As with Maher, the businessman said the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan were critical in focusing a growing political and religious consciousness. "If it"s out of sight it"s out of mind," he said, "but w hen it is on 24-hour TV you are forced to make a choice."
He began fundraising in 2002. " I saw something [wrong] and I wanted to put it right," he told The Observer Magazine. "I"d always done a lot of social activism in my community. You are really drawn into it when you see the pictures [on the TV]. I saw a goliath attacking a small country. I wanted to support victims... children, orphans, the widows of the mujahideen."
From friends, relatives and business clients he raised tens of thousands of pounds in donations, which were passed to an Afghan refugee in London. The Afghan eventually presented him with a letter that was said to be from Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, thanking the businessman for his support and assuring him of "his place in paradise".
Finally, he decided to see what was happening himself and travelled to Peshawar, the rough and lawless Pakistani frontier city. "Going there was like saying: "I will get involved in the fight,"" he said, but he was severely disappointed. The sight of poor, young, unarmed volunteers being loaded on to buses heading for the front in Afghanistan to be used "as cannon fodder" by "warlords who were in it for the money" shocked him deeply. "I came back [to the UK] and said, "It was not a good thing."" He cut his ties with his Afghan contact. Finally, the violence of the 7/7 bombings marked the end of any sympathy for militancy.
According to police sources, the businessman"s case is not rare. Many go much further.
"The truth about radicalisation is that it is often a bottom-up process," says one officer. "There are a lot of people with a lot of unfocused anger and energy. Most don"t act. But then some do. They are operators, often confident men who see things clearly and have the drive to achieve certain ends. For them it is a rational choice."
One example would be Dhiren Barot, a British convert to Islam jailed in 2007 for planning a range of attacks in the UK. Bharot fought in Kashmir with Pakistani-based militants at the end of the Nineties, before going on to pursue an almost decade-long career in Islamic terrorism. Another example is Muktar Said Ibrahim, the ringleader of the failed 21 July 2005 plots in London, who, after being converted from a life of petty crime to radical Islam in Feltham young offenders" institute, sought out training and combat experience. In December 2004, Special Branch officers stopped him at Heathrow and questioned him for three hours before allowing him to board a plane to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. He and two friends were carrying thousands of pounds in cash, a military first-aid kit and a manual on ballistics. Ibrahim is now in prison. The other two men are believed to have died in Afghanistan.
And then there is Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the 7/7 bombers.
Mohammed Siddique Khan is perhaps the most infamous British militant to date. Yet little is generally known about what turned him into a mass murderer. Only short excerpts from the video he recorded before his death have been broadcast and whole periods of his life and radicalisation remain unclear. Yet what we do know of Khan"s journey into terrorism involves almost all of the factors outlined above: he had problems in his home town of Beeston, itself an isolated community, physically and culturally; the conservative, folksy Pakistani religious traditions of his parents were not, he felt, relevant to the present time.
Khan, too, like Dhiren Barot and others, was a "do-er", a "self-starter" . A youth worker, he helped form a gang called the Mullah Boys that took on drug dealers in their neighbourhood and forced addicts in the Pakistani community to go "cold turkey". He was therefore in a good position to recruit others when the time came .
Khan"s "single narrative" view of the world was made clear in the video released after his death. He explained to the British people that just as their role in voting for a government who "perpetrate atrocities against my people" made them "directly responsible", he was "directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters". Also in the video, in a section that wasn"t broadcast, Khan criticised what he said were corrupt and incompetent traditional Muslim clerics in the west. This argument convinced the three younger men who joined him in his plot to kill and maim hundreds in London.
None of the four bombers fits into easily defined categories, though they do, of course, display many of the key elements seen elsewhere. There is the classic profile of the senior man, more experienced and motivated, acting to bring together younger, more impressionable members of the cell. All four are young Muslim immigrants or the children of immigrants. One came from a broken home, one was an nder-achiever at school, the others appear to have enjoyed happy and relatively stable backgrounds. Typically, too, they were not recruited in mosques but through personal contacts .
There appears little in the lives or characters of the 7/7 bombers that marks them out as significantly different from hundreds of thousands of young British or European men, Muslim or other. That is either very reassuring, as militants remain a minuscule minority among Britain"s estimated 2m Muslims, or worrying - as the potential for radicalisation is therefore immense.
Yet even when fully radicalised there is still a distance to travel before becoming a murderous terrorist, particularly if the chosen tactic involves suicide.
On 22 October 2003, a 19-year-old British student, Jawad Akbar, was talking with an old school friend, a 21-year-old from Slough called Omar Khyam, at Akbar"s small flat in a university hall of residence in Uxbridge. The conversation was recorded by MI5. "You"re thinking airports, yeah, [but] what about easy stuff where you don"t need no experience?" Akbar said. "You could get a job, for example, [in] the biggest nightclub in central London where now no one can even turn around and say, "Oh, they were innocent, those slags dancing around"... then you will really get the public talking... if you went for where every Tom, Dick and Harry goes on a Saturday night then that would be crazy."
"If you got a job in a bar or club, say the Ministry of Sound," said Khyam. "What are you planning to do then?"
"Blow the whole thing up," said Akbar. "The best thing you can do is put terror in their hearts. There is no doubt, that is the best thing, there is nothing better than that."
The conversation could be dismissed as youthful bravado were it not for the fact that both men had spent time in a terrorist training camp, and both were involved in the purchase of 600kg of ammonium nitrate, a key ingredient of powerful explosives, less than a month after their talk was recorded by the security services. And one had met senior members of al-Qaeda. Just over six months later, Akbar and Khyam were arrested, along with five other men from south and west London aged between 19 and 35, and are now serving long prison sentences.
The two are alleged to be the ringleaders of the Operation Crevice plot, one of the biggest terrorist conspiracies uncovered in recent years. Named after the operation which foiled their plans, the plot involved a complex network of dozens of individuals and revealed an enormous amount about the way those involved in the plot changed from angry young men into potential mass murderers. That story can be told here for the first time.
Of the five men convicted, four were of Pakistani origin, either first or second generation immigrants; one was born in Algeria but raised in Britain. The average age of the group when they were sentenced was 28, almost the exact average age of British militants. A graph depicting the sprawling nature of the cell, with its multiple links and indistinct hierarchy, is a far cry from the clear organograms often used to depict the structure of militant groups and movements. What is typical is the fact that those involved met each other at school or socially: through mutual friends, through relatives, at Luton mosque, at an Islamic fair at the University of East London, or at religious discussion groups.
The backgrounds of the men were entirely familiar, too. Two came from broken homes. Some came from observant families, the others were raised in homes where the family Koran gathered dust on a shelf. Few were observant as teenagers. None came from poor backgrounds, most had GCSEs or A Levels. Though at least one was an academic high-achiever, several were college dropouts and at least two could be described as disappointments to families with high aspirations. Sport played an important part in the lives of some, women and nightclubbing for others. Many showed evidence of profound identity issues, with surveillance tapes revealing them insulting Pakistan and "Pakis" and referring appreciatively to "the good old British police" while simultaneously talking about blowing up a British Airways jet or a shopping centre. One of the defendants, the Algerian, Anthony Garcia, had anglicised his name because it had a "better ring" in the modelling business where he hoped to make money, some of which he planned to use to finance "the jihad". None had anything but the most superficial knowledge of Islamic theology or, for that matter, of world politics.
For the dozens of men involved in the Crevice plot, the radicalisation process took months in some instances, years in others. But their various paths were typical. In some instances, videos - such as those of attacks on Muslims in India or film of Taliban or Kashmiri fighters in action - played an important part. For others, it was taped sermons by firebrand clerics. At least one told the court that television images of Muslims suffering" had played an important role. At least two involved had contact with the extremist group al-Muhajiroun, a breakaway faction of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned in the UK. "They are a pretty broad cross-section of young British working-class Muslim males," says one senior policeman. "There is nothing particularly noteworthy about any of them."
The first stage of any conspiracy involves a loose group of individuals who have a strong interest in becoming involved in "jihad" coalescing around an individual with a degree of authority. For the 7/7 bombers that was Mohammed Siddique Khan. In the case of Crevice this was Omar Khyam, a college dropout from Crawley, Sussex, who had trained in a militant camp in Kashmir in 2000 and had made a second voyage, into Afghanistan, a year later. By the time the group came together, in Luton, Uxbridge and south London, Khyam had spent many years fundraising locally for fighters in Kashmir and Afghanistan.
The next stage, once a group has formed, is the hardening of their bonds and the focusing of their resolve to act. Researchers and security service analysts have made major efforts in recent years to understand the processes that bind these groups together. They have drawn heavily on research into gangs, cults and "social movements", including extremist anti-globalisation campaigners or anti-vivisectionists.
One council officer in Walthamstow who works with young men involved in gangs pointed out the parallels. "Jihad has become a glamorous alternative lifestyle choice for a lot of these kids," he says. "It"s adventure, it"s rebellion, it"s clandestine. The cells show the same structure as gangs. There is the leader, his close circle, the guy who does the finance, the one who makes them all laugh, the hangers-on who don"t really know what to do. There are the same rituals to bind them all together."
The council officer points out how gangs and militant cells develop their own coded jargon. The tapes of the Crevice defendants show them talking of "the cause" or "the thing", meaning militant Islam, referring to nonbelievers as "kuffs", short for Kufr - or unbelief. They also revealed deep rivalry between different groups of militants who referred to each other as "crews" .
Researchers stress the importance of "small group dynamics" and "fictive kin" - a substitute, invented family. But gangs, groups and even families need to be tightly bonded together, and, as any army sergeant knows, the best way to develop solidarity is through shared pain, adventure, fear and fun.
On a hot morning in July 2003 a small minivan pulled out from the Avari Hotel in the centre of Lahore, western Pakistan, and headed into the traffic. Inside sat the key Crevice plotters, Omar Khyam, Jawad Akbar, Anthony Garcia and a handful of others. Posing as tourists, they broke up the 17-hour drive into the mountains along Pakistan"s frontier with Afghanistan with stops to photograph each other.
Instead of heading into the badlands where Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding, and where the makeshift training camps run by al-Qaeda and the Taliban are located, they turned north as they approached the Afghan frontier, heading up into the picturesque Swat Valley, a beautiful jumble of high valleys and forests. The bus dropped them at Kalam, a trekking resort at the northern end of the valley.
The trip had been organised by Khyam, who had raised £3,500 through collections among sympathisers in the UK to pay a local tribal leader to run a training camp for him. After resting in a cheap hotel the group, equipped with only rudimentary hiking gear, set off for the camp. Progress was so slow they had to spend a night in the open. With the altitude and the heat, Akbar collapsed. And when they reached the camp, it was not what they had expected. "I was thinking about something with ranges and assault courses, like I"d seen on TV," one of the group said later. "But it wasn"t that at all."
Instead, the cash raised by Khyam had bought them two tents - one for the men who ran the camp and the other for everyone else - and a field. They even had to dig a latrine.
The first day was spent doing physical exercises and then, on day two, the local men brought out some AK-47s, a light machine gun and a rocket launcher, and the young Britons, "scared but excited", took turns to fire the weapons. "It was wicked," one said later.
After eight days together, the men returned to Lahore, and most flew back to the UK. But Khyam and an accomplice remained, to continue practising their bomb-making skills in the back garden of a house in the city.
Although makeshift, the camp was effective. Junaid Babar, one of the group, later told the FBI: "After attending the camp... the guys were much more serious. [Before] they were joking around and using slang. After the camp the guys were talking jihad, praying and quoting the Koran. The would say, "One day of jihad is better than 80 days of praying." By the end of the camp they were saying, "Let"s go kill the non-believer.""
Such episodes are common to almost all plots. The 21 July bombers went hiking in the Lake District, the 7/7 bombers went whitewater canoeing in Wales. "The moment when someone puts himself in danger or takes on an additional burden for another member of the group, when he reaches out of a canoe or picks up someone else"s rucksack, that moment is worth more than years of propaganda," says a security source.
But it is not just the new solidarity among a terrorist cell that is important. It is also the way the group begin to see others.
Ed Husain and Shiraz Maher, the two former members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, both talk of how they had been very quickly sucked into a world that was entirely closed off from the rest of society. "Almost all my social contacts were within the movement," says Maher. For some, Husain says, his organisation provided "an entire existence" - food, lodging, employment and company, even wives or husbands. Physical and psychological distance is essential in the formation of terrorist groups: the 9/11 hijackers lived together in a small flat in Hamburg, praying constantly, cooking their own food, reinforcing their world view through long discussions and the viewing of propaganda together. The reason is simple: as the group becomes more and more bound together, the outside world, and those who live in it, retreats. As one former militant who saw action in North Africa explains: "People in "real life" become very distant... They become barely human any more. "
This process of "dehumanising" potential victims - an integral part of all genocides or ethnic massacres - is key to moving the group to the final stages of radicalisation: those where they begin visualising and preparing for extreme violence.
The end of the Crevice cell"s summer training camp did not mean that Omar Khyam"s work was fi nished. The 10-day trip into the Pakistani mountains had been a useful means to bind the group together, but there was more to do. A week later Khyam set off from his Lahore base once again. This time to meet al-Qaeda.
Omar Khyam had met senior al-Qaeda figures before. When he had arrived in Pakistan in spring 2003, a few months before organising the summer training camp, he had hoped to join the Taliban to fight against allied troops . He was not, Khyam"s lawyers argued at his trial, planning attacks on the UK at that stage. However, when friends in Lahore put the 21-year-old in touch with the hardline contacts who would lead him to the Taliban, his plans began to change.
One of the "British brothers" in Lahore had established contact with Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, al-Qaeda"s "director of external operations". When al-Iraqi met Khyam he apparently told the young Briton that "if he was serious" he should "do something" back home. This was not the first time senior al-Qaeda figures had directed young overseas volunteers back to Europe. In some instances, sources say, senior militants have pretended to young, overawed Britons that crossing the border into Afghanistan was impossible and then suggested there might be another way they could be useful. On other occasions, they told volunteers the Taliban had enough men already. This is what is believed to have happened to both Khyam and Mohammed Siddique Khan, when he first went to Pakistan. Only then did they turn their attentions to the UK.
So, rather than introduce Khyam to the Taliban, al-Iraqi arranged for the young Briton to spend a weekend in a house in the dusty town of Kohat, in western Pakistan, learning the basics of bomb-making. One witness at the trial described how Khyam came back from the Kohat camp convinced "the UK should be hit because of its support for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, and because [as] nothing has ever happened in the UK, the UK is unscathed."
Interestingly, Khyam had previously expressed the view that the coalition campaign in Afghanistan had been "more or less" justifi ed. Now his views had hardened.
"Khyam said we need to do more, we should hit pubs, trains and nightclubs," the witness continued. "[Khyam said] targets in the UK are legitimate because British soldiers are killing Muslims and because military targets are too difficult to hit."
It was an argument common among more radical elements in Britain. It was "the single narrative" in its pure form, recycled and reinforced by the al-Qaeda leadership, directed against the UK .
According to government intelligence sources, this is, in part, the critical factor al-Qaeda can provide. The hardcore leadership clustered around bin Laden in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier give the volunteers who seek them out crucial direction, focusing their violent ambitions and hate , leading them a few vital steps further down that path. Men like Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi use a carefully honed message to convince the new recruits to "strike the unbeliever" where al-Qaeda believe they will be most effective: at home.
There are two other - more practical - elements that constitute the xfactor that al-Qaeda can bring to a homegrown plot. Very often, as in a recent terrorist conspiracy uncovered in Germany, there is guidance on the nature of the strike. Khyam apparently came back from that meeting saying his instructions were to work towards "multiple, simultaneous" attacks - an al-Qaeda hallmark. The other is turning potential bombers into potential suicide bombers.
When Khyam and the other Crevice plotters were arrested in the UK, six months after their trip into the mountains, they appeared to be on the point of returning to Pakistan. It is unclear why they might have felt the need to go back, but it is possible that their leaders wanted them to undergo a final session of training, group bonding and mental preparation. For, though Khyam himself had expressed a growing interest in "martyrdom", the others were still talking about escape plans after the bombings they were planning. "My faith was not strong enough [to die]," explained Akbar later. To take them the one final stage further, to turn them into suicide bombers, another session of isolation, of reinforcement of the "jihadi world view" was needed.
Specialists in suicide bombing, such as the academic Scott Atran, say there is no difference between the profi les of suicide bombers and other militants, or indeed between suicide bombers and the broader community from which they are drawn. Logically, therefore, any militant can become a suicide bomber if certain factors are reunited - just as pretty much anyone can become radicalised.
Personal accounts from suicide bombers are rare, for obvious reasons. The last weeks of the 7/7 bombers are still shrouded in mystery. The failed 21 July bombers claim they never meant to detonate their devices - a claim rejected by the court but which profoundly influenced the testimony they gave.
One failed suicide bomber, who at the last minute decided not to blow himself up, gave some indication of the state of mind of someone on the point of killing himself and dozens of others when The Observer Magazine interviewed him in Iraq. The process of radicalisation he describes was typically gradual, starting with prayer meetings and moving deeper into radical militancy. It took a long time to lead him to a situation where the young man, aged 19, began contemplating a suicide attack. "Martyrdom operations" were introduced as an idea after many months of discussion and only raised seriously when the militant had made his way to a remote training camp far from his home town. There, along with the exercise and small arms training, he was exposed to hours of videos showing Muslims as victims of violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir or elsewhere, to lectures from senior clerics on the rewards of martyrdom in the afterlife and the fame and glory such a sacrifice would attract. A friend said he would conduct a similar attack simultaneously. A critical element, the young man said, was that he was convinced his action would be seen as praiseworthy by his family, his peers and the community as a whole. So much so that when his mother located him and came to get him at the camp, he turned her away in tears.
What was most important, he stressed, was the gradual way in which he was led down the path towards "martyrdom". "Each step logically seemed to follow from the next one," he said. "I ended up somewhere I had no intention to go without really knowing how I had got there."
Before the attack, the young man spoke of being "calm", of "thinking about nothing", and of "not wanting to let everybody down" . He only decided not to detonate his device when, in the seconds before, he heard his potential victims talking with his home town accent. In that instant, those he was about to kill became human once again, he said, and he could go no further, and gave himself up.
There are no such testimonies available in the UK, and we will never know what the London bombers were thinking as they said goodbye to each other in front of Boots at King"s Cross station. We will never know what Hasib Hussain thought as he pulled out his mobile and called the three other men whom he must have suspected were already dead. We will not know exactly what he meant when he left a message saying, "I can"t get on the Northern Line," and asking what he should do. Did he mean, perhaps, that his resolve had failed? At the time of the call much of the Northern Line was still open. Or was he merely looking for last-minute practical advice? Or reassurance? We will not know what went through his mind as he sat on the top deck of the No 30 bus in Tavistock Square. No videoed posthumous statement has ever surfaced in which he explains his motivations. All we know is that, though he must have suspected the rest of the group were dead, he triggered his own bomb nonetheless and - perhaps - screamed as he did so.
This investigation has attempted to trace the road to radicalisation. It is far from comprehensive. Much of the information we gathered cannot be used for legal reasons. Equally, the phenomenon we have attempted to describe is profoundly complex and continually evolving. Many analysts see the phase we are now in - six years after the 9/11 attacks - as transitional. Currently, Osama bin Laden and others like him still play an important, though diminished role, in global Islamic militancy and Britain is particularly vulnerable to their influence, due to our historical links to Pakistan and the access many of our citizens have to its training camps.
However, there will come a time when bin Laden and those around him are dead or otherwise eradicated. Then, they will be unable to add the crucial x-factor so important to the Crevice bombers. The drawback is that we will be moving into a new phase of violent militant activity which will be more chaotic than ever, without focal points, leadership or bases.
For although polls show increasing numbers of Muslims across the world rejecting suicide bombing, and the great uprising of the Islamic masses that al-Qaeda hoped to provoke with the 9/11 attacks hasn"t occurred, the ideology of radical Islam remains as powerful as ever. A tiny minority of young men, including a growing number in Europe, will continue to be attracted by it for decades to come. MI5 is concerned about the emergence of "jihadi families", in which the activism of the parents leads their children into radicalism. There is widespread talk of a "generational" struggle, of 20 or 30 years" duration.
The threat from radical Islamic militancy needs to be kept in perspective. None of the individuals referred to in this investigation ever came close to developing the sort of destructive capacity - such as a nuclear device - that would change our societies for ever. However, it is inevitable that their ideology and their new recruits will kill and maim many more before finally being defeated.
Some names and places have been changed. Additional research by Javier Espinoza Jason Burke is the author of Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam.
