David posted last Friday about fears and fear. News has come in this afternoon that a Pakistani man - Kamal Raza Butt - was killed on Sunday in Nottingham. The crime - for which six youths are now in custody - was clearly not (in strict legal terms) directly related to the bombings (since there [...]

UK police said this morning they searched five homes in northern England. They described the search as forming a “significant” part of the investigation into last week’s London bombings. I think it’s useless speculating at this stage what this might mean. I also think it is important that the police are seen to be [...]

This is really a clarificatory post. The bomb which exploded outside the Italian cultural institute in Barcelona this morning does *not* appear to have any relation with international terrorism. Radio reports suggest it is the work of a group of ‘anti-system’ anarchists protesting about arrests of some of their co-thinkers in Italy. Fortunately I don’t [...]

Now this information needs to be treated with extreme caution, since the source in my experience is not of the best, but the Spanish newspaper El Mundo is claiming that the Spanish national intelligence centre (CNI) identified a website posting on 29th May from the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades which may be seen with [...]

Very hard to interpret the information we are receiving right now. Much of it may well be aimed at the terrorists themselves so it is also perhaps better not to dig too deeply.
There are, however, a number of rival (but possibly) compatible theories. One of these, and it is the one I am following most [...]

This Financial Times article about the enormous quantity of photos received by news media associated with the London bombing. The BBC alone received “more than 1,000 still pictures of the unfolding events and 300 different bits of amateur video”. Helen Broaden - BBC director of news - is quoted as saying that “the gap between [...]

Speculation has begun about who exactly is behind the July 7th bombings. The Sunday Times names Mustafa Setmariam Nasar. The grounds for this is information allegedly received from Spanish authorities.
Nasar, who is Syrian,is thought to have been behind the March 11 bombings in Spain and is considered by Spanish intelligence to have [...]

I?m grateful for the thought (and the information and the links) that have gone into recent posts by my co-blogger Edward. I find myself disagreeing with him about only one thing: That the London bombing will (or should) lead to a major change in the way we see things, or to the West?s anti-terror strategy [...]

I am emphasising and emphasising, and emphasising over again: following what has been happening in Spain is important to understand *one* of the evolution pathways of radical Islam in Europe. Unfortunately most of the relevant material is in Spanish. Googling I found this. I cannot vouch for the source, but the information contained in the [...]

The bus bomb puzzle.