Blair Pledges to Confront ‘Evil Ideology’ of Fanatics

As the investigation of the worst attack in Britain since World War II fanned out to Pakistan, Egypt, Jamaica and the United States, Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged Saturday to confront the “evil ideology” of Islamic fanaticism that had inflicted despair on every community here, including Muslims.

Police have now formally identified all four suicide bombers, Scotland Yard reported. Pathologists put names to body parts found in each of the explosions by analyzing DNA samples collected at the men’s homes and from fingerprints left on a prepaid parking stub one of the men left on his dashboard.

Investigators also released the first photo showing the bombers together, a security camera image of the four entering the Luton train station north of London 90 minutes before the blasts tore apart three Underground trains. On Saturday, the twisted wreckage of the red No. 30 bus, which was bombed nearly an hour after the train explosions, was hauled away from Tavistock Square on a flatbed truck.

The death toll from the bombings rose to 55, as a young architect succumbed nine days after being rescued from the blast scene on the Piccadilly Line near King’s Cross Station. His missing girlfriend was believed to have also died in the deadliest of the four explosions.

Anti-terrorism investigators have tied all four transport blasts to young British Muslims who died in the attacks, three of them of Pakistani descent and the fourth having a Jamaican background. But authorities have cast a wide net in their search for the masterminds, explosives experts and financiers.

In Pakistan, police arrested four men Saturday in connection with the bombings, including the head of an Islamic school visited this year by Shahzad Tanweer, the 22-year-old from the northern English city of Leeds who police say bombed the eastbound Circle Line train near the Aldgate Station.

A spokesman for the school, Asad Farooq, told Associated Press in Islamabad, the capital, that Pakistani intelligence agents had questioned faculty members. He denied that Tanweer had ever been a student.

Tanweer’s role in the Aldgate blast and the identity of bus bomber Hasib Hussain, 18, had been made public last week. On Saturday, authorities confirmed the identities of the two other bombers, 30-year-old Mohamed Sidique Khan, who blew up the train near Edgware Road Station, and Germaine Lindsay, a 19-year-old Briton born in Jamaica who set off the Piccadilly Line explosion.

Investigators in Cairo continued their inquiry into the role of a 33-year-old Egyptian chemical engineer detained last week. Magdy el-Nashar rented the Leeds apartment where police raids turned up evidence of explosives in a bathtub. The concoction blending triacetone peroxide, or TATP, with a variant of the military plastic explosive C4 matches the formula used in previous Al Qaeda-linked bombings, investigators say.

The jailed scientist, who had lived and studied in Leeds for the last five years, has insisted that he knew nothing of the London plot and said he had flown to Cairo more than a week before the attacks for a six-week vacation, Egyptian Interior Ministry officials reported.

The Egyptian public prosecutor said he had received no requests for an arrest warrant from Egyptian state security and no extradition request from Scotland Yard. El-Nashar will not be extradited to Britain because there are still no official accusations against him, the prosecutor said in a statement.

In Raleigh, N.C., where El-Nashar was a graduate student in chemical engineering for a semester in 2000, former associates remembered little about him except that he seemed quiet and unassuming.

“Students are a transient population. They come and go, and generally do not become involved with the local community,” said Hamdy Radwan of the Islamic Center of Raleigh, where El-Nashar lived while studying at North Carolina State University.

Khalid el-Kamhawi, who briefly shared an apartment with El-Nashar in Raleigh, said he was amazed to hear the fellow Egyptian’s name mentioned in the London bombings. “He was very, very quiet,” El-Kamhawi said of El-Nashar, describing him as the ideal roommate.

Friends and neighbors in Leeds, however, reported seeing El-Nashar with the most openly radical of the four bombers, the Jamaican-born Muslim convert Lindsay. Neighbors described Lindsay, who had a pregnant wife and 16-month-old son, as an anti-American radical.

In Kingston, the Jamaican capital, security officials huddled with British High Commission authorities to discuss whether there were any residual ties between Lindsay and his Caribbean homeland. Radio Jamaica said Lindsay’s mother, Miriam, had taken him to Britain when he was 5 months old. ABC television reported that the FBI was investigating whether Lindsay had ties to unidentified people in New Jersey.

Blair, speaking to fellow Labor Party members, lambasted those who contend that militants strike in protest of social injustice. Attacks like the July 7 bombings aren’t battles in a clash of civilizations, he said, but the barbaric acts of extremists seeking to impose a brutal and archaic regime on others.

“If it is Iraq that motivates them, why is the same ideology killing Iraqis by terror in defiance of an elected Iraqi government?” Blair asked. “What was Sept. 11, 2001, the reprisal for? ... Why, if it is the cause of Muslims that concerns them, do they kill so many with such callous indifference?”

The Islamic extremists behind the London attacks will never prevail in inflicting their repressive views on the moderate majority, Blair pledged, pointing to the failure of Afghanistan’s Taliban militia, which denied girls the right to education and beset Afghans with lives of deprivation.

Muslim leaders throughout Britain have embarked on an investigation into radicalism. Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, has been touring mosques and community centers to speak with local leaders about the challenge of steering disgruntled young men away from terrorist recruiters.

The families of three of the bombers have issued statements expressing shock and torment over the reported involvement of their relatives. Lindsay’s wife, Samantha Lewthwaite, told the Sun newspaper Friday that she wouldn’t believe her husband was capable of such acts until police showed her the DNA evidence to prove it. But by Saturday, the 21-year-old had joined relatives of Hussain and Khan in insisting that Lindsay must have been brainwashed.

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Times staff writers Megan K. Stack and Hossam Hamalawy in Cairo and Jenny Jarvie in Raleigh and John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this report.