What Drove Those Young Muslims to Become Suicide Bombers? The Mail Sent a Top Writer to Beeston to Find Out. The Anti-Britishness He Encountered Shocked Him Deeply but There Was Also, He Says, a Tiny Glimmer of Hope...

Summary

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STRATFORD STREET has long been a meeting place on warm summer evenings for the Muslim menfolk of Beeston, South Leeds. They have congregated here since the Sixties, when the first generation of immigrants arrived from Pakistan to work in the nearby factories and mills.

In happier times, the men chewed on betel leaves and talked of their upward aspirations, and of cricket. But life has moved on in a way no one could have envisaged, and the youthful gathering I encountered in the neatly-paved square last week had graver matters to discuss.

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What Drove Those Young Muslims to Become Suicide Bombers? The Mail Sent a Top Writer to Beeston to Find Out. The Anti-Britishness He Encountered Shocked Him Deeply but There Was Also, He Says, a Tiny Glimmer of Hope...

One of their 'brothers in Islam' Shehzad Tanweer, aged 22 had been named as the suicide bomber responsible for blowing up the Aldgate Tube train, and as I arrived, his friends and neighbours were conspiratorially mired in the latest revelations.

Understandably, several of them regarded a middle-aged, white English journalist with deep suspicion, but they were outnumbered by others eager to put across their views. And so, until late in the night, I listened.

The words I hear...

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