All eyes are on 'mini-Pakistan'

The young man cruising in the beat-up red car has already checked us out as we turned into Colenso Mount, the street that the youngest London bomber called home until his tryst with terror on 7/7.

The driver of the red car slows down as we near Number 7, chintz curtains pulled firmly across the front. The fib is all too clear when he says he's not sure which red brick terraced house was 18-year-old Hasib Hussain's home.

As we double back, he beckons from across the street, cigarette dangling from his lips.

"Please don't go down that street again," he says in a pronounced northern accent, half threat, half plea.

"No pictures. The family can't take any more, they've had enough."

And I realise, even though he refuses to admit it or tell me his name, that he is Hasib's older brother. The resemblance between the brothers is striking.

The ailing father, who no longer works at the mill, and the rest of the Hussains, shattered that the youngest member of their family was a suicide bomber, were taken to a safe house for questioning.

They had only returned that morning says the Sikh shopkeeper who runs the corner grocery, willing only to be identified as Singh.

"I've seen all these boys grow up, they go up and down the street so many times. The school's right there," he says pointing down the street.

"That is Hasib's brother, he came in for the first time today to get cigarettes," he says of the persistent young man who was now shadowing our every move.

Unfortunately for the Hussains, another series of co-ordinated attacks all the bombs failed to detonate had unfolded in London that day.

Holbeck, the warren of streets that makes up the rundown neighbourhood of Beeston in Leeds, was back in the spotlight as the crucible of Britain's home-grown terror.

Despite their best efforts, any retreat into anonymity for the nearly 40,000 British Muslims of Pakistani origin from Beeston and the

10-15,000 more in the neighbouring town of Dewsbury and Batley, was going to be difficult.

Three of the four bombers lived or worked here. Two of the four were born here. Speculation there could be more hiding among them is rife.

The taint on the two million strong community in the country, many of whom trace their roots to Mirpur in Pakistan administered Kashmir, is growing as the finger points to the involvement of more and more second generation Britons of Pakistani origin in the London bomb attacks.

Bradford, Birmingham and Lancashire have for years wrestled with inter-race attacks that pitted whites against South Asians and Caribbeans.

Mohammad Rafik, Councillor at Leeds City Council, says Leeds has only just put its ugly racial past behind to be confronted now with the new threat to their community thrown up by the Beeston bombers.

"We're all being looked at suspiciously."

Not a peaceful place

A blonde woman trailing two children who lives opposite second bomber Shahzad Tanveer's home and said her name was Mrs Murdoch, says Stratford Street has never been a particularly peaceful place.

"I'm surprised this has not happened before, they're subversives, they keep exploding small bombs, we're not safe."

In contrast, Himani Gunawantana, a Briton of Sri Lankan origin who lives next door to the Murdochs, said he never felt threatened even though he and a handful of other Asians and whites were a minority here.

Clearly, however, there's no escaping the strong influence that the home country has on these inner cities.

London, a bustling, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan cauldron has always been called Londonistan, home to any number of opposition groups from across the world.

Beeston, smaller, painfully drab but prosperous, is a mini-Pakistan. Sholay kebabs says one sign in Urdu and English right next to the fish and chips shop owned by Tanveer, the 22-year-old suicide bomber's father.

Haj and Umrah says one. Iqraa says another where books calling for an end to Western civilisation line the shelves.

At the Stratford Street mosque, frequented by Tanveer's more prosperous family, a row of five to six year olds are seated on the thinning carpet learning the Quran by rote under the eagle eye of a maulvi who is again chary of giving me his name.

At the Hamara Community Centre, considered a success story in inter-race relations, now accused of being the recruiting ground for the young terrorists, signs have gone up saying they will not talk to the media.

The women behind the counter wear the hijab. Two of the three girls lounging across the street are wearing head scarves but the pretty Briton of Bangladeshi origin and her plainer cousin, whose parents moved here from Rawalpindi in Pakistan, are preparing to enter Leeds University shortly.

The third rails at the intrusive media. "They took my photograph without my permission," says the unveiled teenager, "and my auntie's. You know it's against our religion."

But as the girls draped themselves across the iron railings that afternoon and called out flirtatiously to the boys playing football on the other side of the High Street while keeping an eye out for "auntie" who was hovering inside, it's clear this is a generation caught between two worlds.

Do the norms of one teach you to reject the other, I ask Sarwar Khan, who runs a private taxi service in Leeds as do so many Britons of Pakistani origin. Is the lack of integration in these communities a problem?

"It depends on what you mean by integration," said the designated spokesperson of the eminence grise who grace the Jamai mosque on Hardy Street, a building that dates back to 1874.

Subdued men

As the evening prayers ended and the subdued men left the Sunni mosque, Khan said "if it means that our young men can bring home and introduce his girlfriend to "dad" or if it means our girls will have dozens of relationships before they are 20, then no, we are not integrated."

"Beeston is not a Muslim ghetto," Khan emphasised, rejecting the charge that it was here in the Jamai mosque or during the annual trips home where the young are traditionally enrolled in madrassas, and teenagers encouraged to seek guidance, where the seed of radical Islam is planted.

"Most people in Pakistan go to madrassas, does this mean everyone in Pakistan is a radical? How do you explain the role of the Jamaican then? Which madrassa did he attend? There is a big difference between religion and lifestyle."

But tellingly he also made a distinction between his mosque and the Stratford Street brotherhoo