THE ringleader of the July 7 suicide bombers converted to violent jihadism at least six years before he blew himself up on the London Underground, his brother has revealed in his first interview.

Gultasab Khan, a taxi driver from Beeston, Leeds, disclosed that Mohammad Sidique Khan had visited the family’s spiritual adviser in 1999 and told him he wanted to travel to Afghanistan to train for jihad (holy war).

Gultasab Khan’s revelation of his younger brother’s long process of radicalisation, published in next month’s Prospect magazine, goes far beyond the sketchy information that has previously emerged.

He describes how in the mid 1990s Sidique Khan converted to wahhabism, the fundamentalist strain of Islam espoused by the September 11 hijackers. From there he moved into the ranks of violent jihadists – before the 2001 attacks on America or the Iraq invasion two years later.

“It was around 1999,” said Gultasab Khan, 38. “Before that it wasn’t about whether he was going down the route of being a jihadi, it was about him becoming a wahhabi.”

The account has been confirmed by others who knew Sidique Khan in Yorkshire. The picture that has emerged shows that not only Sidique Khan’s family, but also dozens of people in the area knew he was a potentially violent fundamentalist years before July 7, 2005, when he blew himself up on board a Tube train at Edgware Road. Khan killed six people and his three fellow bombers killed a further 46.

Gultasab Khan, who was initially contacted during a taxi ride from Leeds station, was reluctant to speak and his story could be coaxed out of him only gradually in a series of interviews.

However, the account he eventually gave contrasts starkly with last year’s official inquiry into the bombings, which had little to say about Sidique Khan’s radicalisation.

“We do not know how Khan developed his extreme views,” the report admitted, adding that a single unspecified episode may have been to blame: “After one incident in a nightclub, he said that he turned to religion and it changed his life.”

Gultasab Khan described this claim as “bullshit”, saying the change in his brother had been a “gradual process” over many years in which he became alienated from his family and turned for a sense of belonging to international Islamism.

Sidique Khan, born in 1974, was the youngest of four children of Tika Khan, a foundry worker who was one of the first Pakistani settlers in Yorkshire.

The young Sidique Khan was considered well integrated. Robert Cardiss, who knew him well, said: “He was friends with the in-crowd, he had white mates as well as Asian and he would quite often be round the back of the gym at breaktime.”

He was a conscientious member of his community but, in common with many other young men of Pakistani origin, the generation gap with his parents would become increasingly stark.

In the mid1990s he became a prominent member of the Mullah Boys, a group set up by the younger generation to deal with growing numbers of young drug addicts in Beeston who were alienated from their Pakistani parents. Older members of the community were seen as either failing to understand what was going on or not facing up to the problem.

The Mullah Boys set up the Iqra bookshop – later raided by police investigating the July 7 bombings – which became a focal point for young Muslims in the area. Even marriages outside the ambit of traditional customs were conducted in the bookshop.

“People appreciated the kids running a bookshop because these were peers to the younger generation who were no longer listening to their elders,” said Gultasab Khan.

Gradually some of the Mullah Boys, including Sidique Khan, fell under the influence of wahhabi preachers at local mosques. It seemed a convenient path for young men who did not feel British but wanted to escape the tribal traditions brought from Pakistani villages by their Urdu-speaking families. The wahhabis preached and wrote in English and their vision of a worldwide Muslim struggle provided a ready-made sense of belonging.

Gultasab said he first noticed his brother was taking religion more seriously “as young men of a certain age do” in 1994-95 when, between prostrations at prayer, he used hand gestures specific to wahhabis.

Shortly afterwards Sidique Khan moved further away from his family when he fell in love with Hasina Patel, his future wife, when they were both at Leeds Metropolitan University in 1997. This was in defiance of family expectations that he would marry someone whose family originated from the same part of Pakistan.

In 1999 the family, worried at his failure to conform, sent him to see Fiaz ul-Hassan, the family’s spiritual adviser, who said Khan described to him how his views on Islam had changed and said that he wanted to go for jihad training in Afghanistan.

The attempt to “detoxify” Sidique Khan by using a priest from the older generation only worsened his alienation. This became complete when his father moved the family to Nottingham, hoping Sidique Khan would follow and leave behind his girlfriend and wahhabi associates. Instead, he stayed and married Hasina. His father then broke off all relations.

As Sidique Khan became more alienated, the signs of ex-tremism became more pronounced. Hassan Butt, a former radical who met him twice, said: “When you’re cut off from your family . . . the jihadi network becomes your family, it becomes your backbone and support.”

Sidique Khan became a recruiter for the jihadi cause alongside Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif, the two Britons who travelled to Israel in 2003 to carry out suicide bombings.

Kursheed Fiaz, a Manchester businessman, described how in 2001 Sidique Khan, Hanif and Sharif visited his office to preach to his nephews. “My lads thought, ‘We’ll have a chat with them, see what they’re made of’,” said Fiaz. Sidique Khan encouraged the boys to go to Pakistan, Syria and Afghanistan to learn Islam at its purest. “That’s when I got a bit wary,” said Fiaz, who told Khan not to come back.

As Sidique Khan’s life became focused on the narrow area around the Iqra bookshop, the Hardy Street mosque and his mentoring work with local youths, he became increasingly close to two other July 7 bombers from Beeston – Shehzad Tan-weer and Hasib Hussain.

The fourth bomber, Jermaine Lindsay, is thought to have met him through Abdullah al-Faisal, a radical preacher who was jailed in 2003 for inciting racial hatred and later deported to Jamaica.

Sidique Khan’s video testament, released after July 7, showed that British policy in the Middle East had hardened his attitude and helped to trigger his final decision to attack London.

His disgust at older Pakistani Britons also came through clearly. “Our so-called scholars today are content with their Toyotas and semidetached houses,” he sneered. “They tell us ludicrous things, like we must obey the law of the land.”

Like others in the community, Gultasab Khan said he had never seriously believed Sidique Khan or his fellow radicals would become active terrorists. But he would not condemn his brother, replying “no comment” when asked if the bombing was permitted or forbidden under Islam.

He acknowledged the Beeston community continued to tolerate wahhabis and other radicals despite July 7, largely because of the discipline they helped to instil in otherwise disillusioned young people. “Even now [the wahhabis] are praying here,” said Gultasab. “But better them being wahhabi than being on drugs.”

— Shiv Malik’s article The Making of a Terrorist appears in the June issue of Prospect magazine, on sale from Thursday, and at www.prospect-magazine.co.uk

Warning signs

How Mohammad Sidique Khan became a killer

1974 Born in Leeds

1994-95 Conversion to Wahhabi Islam

1999 Cleric warns family Sidique Khan is moving towards violent radicalism

2001 Defies family to marry Hasina Patel

2001 Becomes primary school learning mentor

2002-4 Travels to training camps in Pakistan where he meets “fertiliser bomb” plotters convicted at Old Bailey last month

July 7, 2005 Sidique Khan and three accomplices blow themselves up on London’s transport system, killing 52 other people

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