Portrait of the Week – 23 July 2005

The fourth suicide bomber in the attacks on London, now found to have killed 56, was named as Jamal, formerly Jermaine, Lindsay, a Jamaican-born convert to Islam. The explosive they used was said to be unstable home-made acetone peroxide. Magdy al-Nashar, a British-trained biochemist whose flat in Leeds had been used by the bombers, was arrested by police in Cairo, but they declared he played no part in the bombings. Three of the bombers had attended a religious school in Pakistan, but Mr Munir Akram, the Pakistan ambassador to the United Nations, said Britain should not ‘externalise’ its search for blame; ‘Britain is now a breeding ground for terrorists too,’ he said. The British government conferred with opposition parties on new legislation against planning or glorifying terrorism. Only 30 out of 646 MPs turned up when an exercise in responding to a terrorist attack was held. Six former chiefs of the defence staff complained in the Lords that soldiers’ lives were being put at risk by threats of prosecution for using firearms; Lord Guthrie said that ‘civilian solicitors from the UK are touting for business on the streets of Basra’.