16 February 2011
7/7 inquests: gang ringleader tried to convert schoolboy to Islam
The inquest was told about the background of the bombers and how they became radicalised for the first time, starting with Sidique Khan.
He was said to be well liked at Hillside Primary School by parents, staff and pupils and was described as “almost like a father” to those from broken homes.
“One pupil became quite close to him and Khan would take him around to his associates and try to interest him in the Muslim faith,” Hugo Keith QC, counsel for the inquest said.
Acting Det Insp Peter Sparks explained how the young man was taken to the Iqra bookshop in Beeston, which Sidique Khan and others used as somewhere to sell Islamic literature, use computers and talk about Islam
Khan had tried to persuade [the pupil] on numerous occasions to convert to Islam,” DI Sparks said.
The inquest heard later that the child was as young as 11 or 12 when he was told “people will pay for what has been done to Pakistan” along with comments about September 11 during a conversation in Sidique Khan’s car
Sidique Khan apparently told the school that his father was ill and then that he was depressed in order to explain a series of absences and eventually resigned at the end of 2004, seven months before the bombings.
Another young man told police that Sidique Khan had organised paintballing, quad biking and visits to a climbing wall.
Gareth Paterson, representing some of the bereaved families, said Sidique Khan was mentoring children with behavioural problems.
“Children described as disaffected children, in a sense, vulnerable children,” he added.
He was said to have no formal qualifications for the job but had been working with young people from July 1997.
On another occasion Sidique Khan was asked if he could arrange a speaker for the school to talk about the Koran, but the man talked with such “fervour” that the other staff became concerned.
He was brought up as a Muslim by his father but “turned out to be more religious” than his siblings, according to statements by the family to police.
At Hardy Street mosque, attended by his family, he organised trips for local children and set up activities in the countryside, the inquest heard.
“He was providing mentoring really for the youngsters coming into the mosque,” DI Sparks told the hearing. “He was very much looked up to.”
He added: “Youths looked up to him, not because he was an extremist but because he was just a nice man and very well respected.”
But his brother, Mohammed, has told police that Sidique Khan spoke to him at length about which schools of Islam he should follow – in particular al-Muhajiroun, an extremist group led by preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed, now living in Lebanon, and associated with Abu Hamza, serving a jail sentence for incitement to murder.
“His brother tried to persuade him from going along this line,” DI Sparks said.
Around the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001, Sidique Khan was said to have changed his outlook and become more religious, at the same time swapping mosques to another in Stratford Street, Beeston.
Sidique Khan, his fellow bomber Shehzad Tanweer and a number of others set up the bookshop as a charity on February 14 2003, after a “rift” developed with the management of the Hardy Street Mosque where he had run a gym in the basement and was employed as a youth worker by Leeds City Council.
Sidique Khan and the others became focused on the Wahabi sect of Islam, a fundamentalist school of the faith practiced in Saudi Arabia, the inquest heard.
He studied for a degree in business management at Leeds Metropolitan University and worked as an administrator for the Benefits Agency before becoming a learning mentor at Hillside Primary School.
The headteacher at the school told police that “no one had an inkling or witnessed anything to suggest” that Sidique Khan had become radicalised.
But in July 2003, Sidique Khan travelled to Pakistan for the first time to receive terrorist training with a friend from Beeston.
In July 2004, the brother of Hasib Hussain, the youngest of the bombers, noticed that Sidique Khan and Tanweer were using his parents’ absence on a trip abroad, to visit the house and pray into the early hours of the morning.
He visited Pakistan again in October 2004, this time with Tanweer, and on his return the pair began buying bomb-making chemicals.
Tanweer was also involved in taking the pupil to the bookshop, the inquest heard.
The other bombers – Jermaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain, who both met Sidique Khan when still in their teens – showed signs of radicalism while still at school.
Lindsay was “trying to convert pupils with great enthusiasm and vigour” at school in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and got in trouble for distributing leaflets supporting al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
He told friends he wanted to join the British Army so that he could kill his fellow soldiers, the inquest heard.
Hussain wrote on a piece of paper to fellow pupils after September 11 “You’re next” and referred to al-Qaeda in an exercise book by which he had drawn a picture of an aeroplane crashing into the Twin Towers in New York.
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