Europe Meets the New Face of Terrorism
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/international/europe/01threat.html
August 1, 2005
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
LONDON, July 31 - One attack was deadly, the other was not. But taken together, the two terrorist strikes that hit London in July highlight a new, more ominous face of terrorism in Europe.
It transcends ethnic lines and national causes, blends ideological fervor with common criminality and is rooted to a large extent inside the target country. Shifting assumptions about the nature of the terrorist threat, it also complicates efforts to devise strategies to combat it.
Although some senior intelligence and law enforcement officials said they began to recognize the mutating threat at the time of the train bombings in Madrid in March 2004, the London bombings have reinforced the lesson that, by all accounts, the centrally controlled Al Qaeda of 9/11 is no more.
"We are seeing a terrorist threat that keeps changing," said Pierre de Bousquet, the director of France's domestic intelligence service, known as the D.S.T., in an interview in Paris. "Often the groups are not homogeneous, but a variety of blends."
"Hard-core Islamists are mixing with petty criminals," he added. "People of different backgrounds and nationalities are working together. Some are European-born or have dual nationalities that make it easier for them to travel. The networks are much less structured than we used to believe. Maybe it's the mosque that brings them together, maybe it's prison, maybe it's the neighborhood. And that makes it much more difficult to identify them and uproot them."
In the case of the London attacks of July 7 that left 56 people dead, including the four bombers, three of the attackers were ethnic Pakistanis born in Britain, the fourth a British citizen and convert to Islam born in Jamaica.
The strike that followed two weeks later, in which the four bombs did not explode, was carried out by an intriguing crew that the police say included a British resident born in Somalia, an Ethiopian who apparently posed as a Somali refugee to gain legal residency in Britain and a British citizen born in Eritrea who acquaintances say was radicalized in prison. The nationality and legal status of the fourth would-be bomber has not been disclosed.