Authorities say mosque was radicals' haven

LONDON -- Ibrahim Muktar Said and Hassan Omar were among the crowd of young men removing their shoes and laying out prayer rugs at the Finsbury Park mosque last year, according to police and Muslims who attend the mosque. They recall the two East Africans taking in the fiery street sermons of Abu Hamza al-Masri, a radical cleric who has openly called for jihad, or ''holy war," against infidels.

Said and Omar, who are being questioned in connection with the July 21 attempt to blow up a double-decker bus and an Underground train, were seen at the mosque again in March, just four months before the botched attack, handing out leaflets opposing leaders of the moderate Muslims who had reclaimed the mosque from Masri and other radicals.

British counterterrorism investigators say the mosque is one of several locations linked to two separate terrorist cells that targeted the London transportation system last month.

A brick building in religiously and ethnically diverse North London, the Finsbury Park mosque came to symbolize a brand of Islamic extremism that took root in Britain in the mid-1990s around the time that Masri and his followers seized control of the mosque. British counterterrorism officials say the mosque became a classic example of a ''gateway" where young Muslims come to worship and then are recruited to more radical causes.

There are at least a dozen such mosques in Britain, investigators say, including mosques in Leeds, Birmingham, Luton, and Leicester. Similar mosques in Madrid, Amsterdam, Milan, and other European cities are believed to be where young Muslims congregate and are guided out of view of police surveillance before being groomed as terrorists, according to police and others familiar with the operations.

Recruiters play on the alienation felt by first-generation immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East -- young Muslims who have rejected the values of their old country but see their new country as morally corrupt.

They are taught that from Palestine to Chechnya, Muslims are suffering at the hands of the the ''Zionist-Crusader alliance," as Osama bin Laden and his followers refer to the United States, Britain, Israel, and other Western countries.

This recruitment and indoctrination process, which was spelled out in a document delivered to the British prime minister's office last year, also includes a maze of contacts, websites, and Islamic bookstores that British investigators are racing to penetrate in the hunt for the masterminds of the July 7 suicide bombings that killed 52 commuters, and the botched July 21 attack.

Besides Said and Omar, the Finsbury park mosque appears to have been a meeting point for at least two of the bombers in the deadly July 7 attack -- Mohammed Siddique Khan, a British-born school teacher of Pakistani descent and the alleged ringleader in Leeds of three younger men who carried backpacks laden with bombs, and Germaine Lindsay, a British citizen of Jamaican origin who converted to Islam and survived.

A third July 21 bombing suspect known as Hussein Osman, whose real identity was revealed as Hamdi Isaac from Ethiopia, said in an interrogation after being arrested in Rome that he also attended Finsbury Park, according to notes of that interrogation in Rome, excerpts of which were translated for the Globe.

Mohammed Sekkoum, an Algerian-born British citizen and devout Muslim, is a community leader in Finsbury Park and was among the moderates who worked for years to try to expel the militants from the mosque.

Sekkoum said he recognized Said, who came to England from Eritrea at the age of 14, and Omar, who came from Somalia at the age of 12, as regular worshipers at Finsbury Park. Other members of the mosque, who asked not to be named, confirmed Sekkoum's recollection.

''Those two young men were always together and were there very often. They would stay there overnight and it was their base in a way . . . They were among many of the young people being inculcated," said Sekkoum. ''About three months before the bombings, they were there handing out literature and distributing video about the war in Iraq."

Sekkoum, who knows many young immigrants who attend the mosque because he has helped them with asylum cases and otherwise adjusting to life in Britain, said, ''My impression was that they were lost, not militant. I just didn't think, and I still don't think, they were the real thing, the real Al Qaeda. Not at all. Certainly they were involved, but I will not be surprised if we find out they were dupes."

Long before the London attacks, the mosque was attended by other Al Qaeda-inspired militants. That list includes ''shoe bomber" Richard Reid, who was convicted for attempting to blow up a passenger jet before he was apprehended and the plane grounded in Boston; Zacarias Moussaoui, dubbed the ''20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks, who was arrested in August 2001 after receiving flight training; and Asif Hanif, 21, a British citizen of Pakistani descent who killed himself and three others in a suicide bombing attack on a Tel Aviv nightclub in 2003.

''Finsbury Park was a pilgrimage place for extremists. They gravitated there and it was an accommodation center for many of them, a place where radical indoctrination occurred and where false documents could be obtained," said Charles Shoebridge, a 20-year veteran in counterterrorism for the British military and police.

Masri, who is blind in his left eye and has a hook for a right hand from injuries suffered in the 1990s fighting with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, was banned from preaching at the mosque in late 2002 by British authorities who monitor religious charities. For more than a year, he shifted his sermons to the street outside the mosque, before being detained in 2004.

The Egypt-born British citizen is currently being held in Belmarsh Prison while fighting extradition to the United States for his alleged role in helping to set up a terrorist training camp in 1999 in Oregon.

British courts have been reluctant to extradite such militants to the United States because they are bound by a European treaty that prevents turning a suspect over to any country where they may face the death penalty.

''Al-Masri is definitely one of those people at the center of an ongoing debate . . . which began after Sept. 11 but which has reached a new urgency after the Madrid and now the London bombings," said a US official speaking on condition of anonymity.

In addition to differences over Masri, relations between the United States and Europe have been strained by differences in overall strategy. That Washington has recognized the need to change the words, if not the tactics, it uses was reflected in a recent US State Department directive to embassies, instructing them to refer to what had been designated as the ''Global War on Terror" to the ''Global Strategy Against Violent Extremism," according to the press office of the US Embassy in London.

Part of working closely together, US and European counterterrorism officials stress, is enlisting moderate Muslim leaders into the struggle. In February, moderates at Finsbury Park, which they prefer to call the North Central Mosque, brought the mosque back under the control of the community. A banner over the entrance welcomes a ''New Beginning" for the mosque and quotes a passage from the Koran: ''Whoever kills an innocent soul . . . It is as if he killed all mankind."