For Jamaican native, life path led from success to extremism

ST. GEORGE'S, Grenada -- In the two weeks since 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay blew himself up in a London subway, taking 26 other lives with him, investigators and loved ones have been left with a central mystery: What led a rising athletic and academic star to become one of Western Europe's first suicide bombers?

''I can't believe it," Maryam McLeod Ismaiyl, his grieving mother, a Dorchester resident, said yesterday. ''I have so many questions, and I do not know if I will ever receive the answers."

''Jamal, as he would love to be called, was the best son I could have ever hoped for," she told reporters in the capital of the Caribbean island, where she is staying for the summer with her husband's family. ''I am still in shock and know not how to grieve for my son. Therefore, I grieve first for the victims."

Lindsay's life journey that ended on the subway train near King's Cross station took some crucial turns. He converted to Islam at the age of 15, following his mother's lead, and during high school he drew on his faith to shine as a student and athlete. But he ended up in a series of dead-end jobs after his mother remarried and moved to the United States. And then his religion took him in a radical direction.

The three others suspected in the coordinated bombings July 7 that killed at least 52 commuters, in addition to the bombers, were of Pakistani descent. They traveled there last year for training and support. But Lindsay was born in Jamaica, and there is no evidence so far that he took such a trip. His main tie with his fellow bombers appears to have been a fervent and ultimately deadly fanaticism that developed over the past two years.

Interviews with family, friends, and neighbors paint a portrait of Lindsay as a talented young man who saw religion as an anchor in an often tumultuous life.

Lindsay barely knew his father, a Jamaican who left his mother when he was born. The man Ismaiyl later married, Barry Reid, brought the family from Jamaica to Huddersfield, a working-class town about 15 miles from Leeds, the industrial city in northern England where the terrorist cell allegedly organized and plotted.

Reid, who still lives in Huddersfield, dropped out of his stepson's life when the couple divorced when Lindsay was about 5.

About four years ago, Ismaiyl, who grew up in a Christian church, decided to convert to Islam after meeting a Muslim man and reading about the religion on the Internet. Lindsay was thrilled and embraced their new faith wholeheartedly, she said. He grew a beard, prayed at a mosque five times a day, and studied the Koran in Arabic.

At the time of the family's conversion, a ''climate of extremism" was growing in Islam, Ismaiyl said, and she sometimes discussed with her son the violent acts of other Muslims. Both agreed that suicide bombing was unacceptable.

''What I know of Jamal, he understood the religion," she said.

Ismaiyl said she tried to keep a tight rein on her children, not letting them out after dark and keeping constant tabs on their whereabouts. ''Perhaps I was too strict, but that's how I brought him up, and I brought him up with a lot of love," she said.

On the ethnically mixed streets of Huddersfield, many of his classmates from Pakistan and Bosnia smoked marijuana, loitered outside shops, and wooed girls. After he converted, Lindsay came to be known as the most pious of all the Muslim teens in the hardscrabble neighborhood and tried to convert other children.

''He became more extreme than anybody else," recalled Chris John, 17, a high school classmate and neighborhood friend from Lindsay's youth. ''When he converted, he stopped hanging out with his normal friends."

Lindsay stopped chasing girls and play-fighting in the halls of Rawthorpe High School. He turned his attention to academics and athletics, where by all accounts he shined. He broke records in track and scored some of the highest marks in the school on exams. When other kids would write a few paragraphs for a history essay, he would lay out his argument all afternoon, in page after page after page.

In all that he accomplished, Lindsay credited his religion.

''Every little thing that he did, he would always say 'Allah Akbar' [God is great] as loud as he could after everything," said a close friend from high school who asked that his name be withheld because of the media attention. ''Whether it was getting a goal [in soccer], or winning the 100-meter."

Everything changed after Lindsay graduated from high school, perhaps due to an accident of fate. He applied to Greenhead College, a nationally acclaimed school in Huddersfield, and his exceptionally high grades assured him admission, the close friend recalled. But his application was lost in the mail, the friend said, and by the time he reapplied the school was already full.

So he spent the entire year casting about for something to do. Around that time, Ismaiyl moved to the United States, and about a year ago came to Boston to be close to her father in Dorchester. Her children remained in England. ''They chose to stay," she said.

His sister, then about 15, went on to live on her own in a small public housing apartment in Huddersfield with a broken glass door, where she hung out with friends and a former boyfriend with whom she is expecting a child.

Lindsay took a different direction. He moved to a small room above a storefront in Huddersfield, across from the Omar Mosque and a shop selling food that is halal, or approved by Muslim law. Around the same time, on the same tiny street, a now-disbanded extremist group from London, Al-Muhajiroun, began distributing leaflets and attempting to buy property to set up a teaching center, said Mehboob Khan, a local councilor.

Lindsay eventually broke with mainstream teachings and became a follower of Abdullah el Faisal, a Jamaican-born cleric now in jail on charges of inciting violence against non-Muslims.

Over the next few years, Lindsay moved often, bouncing between at least five addresses and working a series of short-term jobs, including laying carpets, according to published reports in British newspapers. Two things seemed to give him a sense of direction: religion and the gym. Investigators believe that he eventually found both in Mohammed Sidique Khan, a 30-year-old father figure, who taught martial arts classes at a gym in an Islamic center in nearby Leeds. Khan would later lead Lindsay and two other students to London for a deadly task, according to investigators.

But even as Lindsay drifted toward extremism, he continued to build the life of a family man. Through friends, he met a fellow convert who was as outspoken about religion as he was, and married her in a quiet ceremony at home.

Samantha Lewthwaite, 22, who studied religion in college, had converted to Islam a few years earlier and taken to wearing full Islamic dress when she went outdoors. Classmates at the Grange School in Aylesbury, where she grew up, recall her as an opinionated person whose best friends were Muslim and who, after the Sept. 11 attacks, said the hijackers were simply ''standing up for their rights."

Lewthwaite has issued a statement saying that she ''totally condemns" the London bombings, and ''never predicted or imagined that [Lindsay] was involved in such horrific activities."

Just over a year ago, the couple had a son, Abdullah, and moved near Lewthwaite's family to a house in Aylesbury, a town 40 miles outside London, to wait for their second child.

Neighbors at their most recent home recalled him as a doting father who would wave to them when he double-parked his red Fiat in front of the house on the crowded street -- the same car that was found after his death in a parking garage filled with nine extra bombs.

He lifted weights with a friend at the Body Flex Health Club, according to the gym's owner. To break the ice, he challenged everyone at the gym to arm-wrestle, he said.

On June 6, Lindsay bought $175 worth of vitamin supplements and peppered other men at the gym with questions about what weights to use to gain muscle, and what types of food to eat.

''If he were going to kill himself, why would he waste all the money on that?" the gym owner asked.

But across town, at the local mosque in Aylesbury, there were already signs that Lindsay had turned toward a violent, radical philosophy. He broke ties with a study circle that he had been attending, after the older scholar who was leading it tried unsuccessfully to convince Lindsay that Sept. 11 was not a ''good thing," according to Abdulhaq Addae, a spokesman for the Brixton Mosque in London, which he said Lindsay did not attend.

Thousands of miles away, Ismaiyl said she last spoke with Lindsay on the phone about a month ago, chatting about his wife and son. Nothing seemed askew.

''He was so mature, and he was so sincere and so loving," she said.

Ismaiyl said she has talked with local police in Grenada and authorities in Britain and with Lewthwaite several times since her son's death, and there is a part of her that still doesn't believe it. ''I need evidence to know that my son killed anyone," she said, defiance in her tone.

''I think I did a really good job with my son. He had good values. I did the best I could," Ismaiyl said through tears.

In her grief, she has turned to Allah: ''He's the one who knows everything."

Stockman reported from Huddersfield, England; Slack reported from St. George's, Grenada.