Video links bombings to al Qaeda

CCTV footage shows London bombers (L-R) Shehzad Tanweer, Germaine Lindsay and Mohammed Sidique Khan at Luton train station.

LONDON - A video by Shehzad Tanweer, right-hand man to the lead London suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan, has lent new weight to the theory that al Qaeda was behind the London bombings.

Tanweer's last testament, like Khan's last September, features an accompanying statement from Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second-in-command, bears the stamp of al Qaeda's video production company and includes a contribution by American Adam Gadahn, widely believed to be running the group's propaganda operation.

But it is also possible al Qaeda has appropriated Tanweer's video as a publicity stunt.

Though it probably helped train the London bombers, no evidence points to a controlling al Qaeda mastermind behind the blasts, which occurred a year ago.

Tanweer vows that the attacks will continue until troops are pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan and "you stop your support" for America and Israel.

"What you have witnessed now is only the beginning," he says.

Deliberately released to the Arab TV station al-Jazeera to coincide with the anniversary of the London bombings, the words of Tanweer also provide an insight into his indoctrination by Khan, the primary school mentor who attracted him and others to a youth club at the Hardy Street Mosque in Leeds and, amid the boxing and pool sessions, plied them with stories about abuse of Muslims.

In the same thick Leeds accent which made Khan's video so chilling, Tanweer insists on film that British non-Muslims must die because they elected the Government which has perpetrated atrocities against Muslims.

This is an echo of Khan's mantra, in his own video, that "your democratically elected Government continues to perpetrate atrocities."

Tanweer, who killed himself and seven innocent people in the Aldgate Tube bomb, wears the same red and white chequered headdress that Khan did.

He points animatedly at the camera - as did his mentor. Yet Tanweer seems less confident than his leader: while Khan stared straight at the camera throughout, Tanweer looks down, presumably at a script.

Both videos feature the same background, which suggests they were made at the same time - possibly during the visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan which they made together, in November 1994 and February 1995.

The video is cut with footage of people mixing chemicals to manufacture bombs and images of an unidentified man circling points on a map of London with a black pen. There is also footage of militants armed with guns, while Zawahiri appeared with a machine gun propped up on the wall behind him.

Tanweer's appearance on the second video underlines his seniority in the bombing team. Though known affectionately to his family as "kaka" ("little one") the 22-year-old son of a chip shop owner was a highly focused and independent jihadist.

He is believed to have travelled without Khan to at least one terrorist training camp near the Kashmir border in Pakistan, in January 2005.

He and Khan became known to the security services on the "periphery" of other surveillance operations before the bombings, but other priorities meant no further investigation took place.

- INDEPENDENT