My Brother the Bomber (Profile of 7/7 Bomber)

Prospect Magazine-UK ^ | June 2007 | Shiv Malik

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Nonetheless, people who have lived in Beeston for years say that until the drug dealers moved in five to ten years ago, the appeal of the area was its strong sense of community. But after hard drugs arrived, neighbourliness was abandoned as people scurried home past the crack dens and wrecked houses. Heroin and crack helped to sustain a certain level of racial segregation too—it's hard to be nice to strangers when you're living in a drugs warren.

I had come to Beeston in September 2005 on assignment with the BBC. Jim Booth, a producer with the Manchester news and current affairs department, had asked if I would like to help a research team and a scriptwriter put together a factual drama based on the lives of the four 7/7 bombers—three of whom came from Beeston—that the BBC was planning to air on the first anniversary of the bombings. I had lived in Leeds for many years, and so I was familiar with Beeston's shabbiness. Many journalists who landed there after 7/7 saw its poverty and assumed that there must be a direct link to the bombings. But the more we learned about Beeston and its bombers, the more this hypothesis turned out to be a red herring. Although poverty and exclusion are themes that wound their way through the lives of the Beeston bombers, it is the internal frictions within a traditional Pakistani community in Britain that best explain the radicalisation that led to the deaths of 56 people.

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This is an long, but interesting article. There are glimpses of how radical Islam approaches recruiting these suicide bombers. It also gives you an idea as to why the UK is such a fertile breeding ground. The best part of this piece is where the BBC turns down the script based on the article because it would be "anti-Muslim"!