The town that grew the suicide bombers

Violent tinge
When I visited the park one afternoon, a crowd gathered in preparation for a pickup soccer game. One teenager with a swagger, who had earlier told me he knew Tanweer, began to yell at a little stray dog looking for attention, and then threw a small log at the mutt. He must have broken its leg, and everyone laughed at the dog as it limped away.

Shortly after that incident there was a commotion under a large tree. Two young blond women had begun a fistfight, and young men circled around, calling out as they would to a pair of boxers. The woman fell to the ground and bashed each other in the dirt until one of the older men of the community broke up the fight, and the two women, blood pouring from their noses, walked away.

The man who broke up the fight was named Jimmy Hussein and he came over to talk. The diversity of the neighborhood, he pointed out, was driven home in the way that an "Asian" man like himself would graciously break up a fight between two "British" women as he called them.

He was in his thirties, but he reminisced about the old days in his Yorkshire accent. Back in the eighties, he said, he and the others of Pakistani origin banded together to rumble in the streets against the brutal skinheads of Leeds. His father, from another culture, told him to stay at home, but he'd sneak out to join the fray. Now things were stable in the neighborhood, although the young people still need a united front, he said.

As for the terror attacks committed by men from his neighborhood, he condemned them, and then launched into a rambling speech on foreign policy.

"If America goes to Iraq or Afghanistan," he asked absurdly, sticking his chest out, "what stops them from going here tomorrow?" he asked.

Youth mentor?
Down Hardy Street, several blocks from that park, one of the local mosques is housed in an unremarkable two-story brick building. Up above the frieze, in stone, are carved the words "Leeds Industrial Cooperative Society Ltd. 1897."

It was in the basement of that building that the ringleader of the bombing plot, Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, used to work with local youngsters. Khan, the father of a 14-month-old daughter, blew himself up near the Edgware Road underground station in London, killing seven people.

It is anyone's guess what he taught his students. Whatever it was, one of his diligent pupils was Tanweer, and another was Hussain.

Khan mentored local youths, and worked as teaching assistant at the local school. The British government report on the bombing speculates that "Khan used the opportunities these places afforded at least to identify candidates for indoctrination..."

Asif Iqbal, 20, with a scraggly beard on a handsome face, angrily tried to defend Khan and the other bombers. "I didn't say it's right or wrong, I'm saying why have they done it? Get your head around that! He wasn't twisted or brainwashed... taking the easy way out, some criminal mastermind. This isn't no Hollywood blockbuster,” argued Iqbal. “They did what they believe from the heart. And people can't accept they could do something for what they believe in... If it's right or wrong, that's what they believed in."

Khan had grown up in Beeston, but later moved about 20 minutes away to a town called Dewsbury, where he married the daughter of a local woman active in philanthropy. Their neighbors said Khan's wife wore the complete abaya head-covering.

Vague definition of 'extremism'
One place Khan held forth, according to the locals, was a bookshop called the Iqra Learning Center. The police raided it and closed it down although it is unclear what intelligence they gained from the location.

One of the founders of the center, a friendly and polite man named Mohammed Zahir, had a little forked beard, wore a traditional robe and ran the Zakaria Money Saver Super Store. Framed Quranic verses decorated the walls of his shop, and the shelves were packed with soap, plastic buckets and electric fans.

What Zahir had to say about when asked about that attacks underlined how fluid the definition of "extremism" can be. "There is absolutely no extremism at all," he said, "just talk about how the West is oppressing Muslims and non-Muslims."

As Zahir was explaining his philosophy on extremism, an old English grandmother wearing a dress hobbled into the shop to buy a can of paint. She had no money on her, she told Zahir.

"Money is not the important thing for me," he cried out, "so long as I see a smile on your face." She did smile, and she tottered out of the store with the paint can. She too, was part of the social life of Beeston.

Aram Roston is an NBC News Investigative Unit Producer.

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