Qur’an verses? You mean…this jihad warrior read the Qur’an? But, but…didn’t he learn to live a life of peace and tolerance? What’s that? He learned from the Qur’an that he should wage war against the unbelievers? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?
From the New York Times:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 4 – In a small house outside the city of Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, a 25-year-old man from the suburbs of London chronicled his personal holy war in the pages of a diary.
March 10, 2005. “All alone in a strange land,” he writes. “I can trust no-one except Allah.”
March 26. Questions how fellow Muslims can live peacefully in London when the “kufr,” or unbelievers, have turned every corner of the globe into “a battlefield for the Muslims.” Calls London the “vital organ of the minions of the devil.”…
What specific operation the man, Zeeshan Siddique, was preparing for is unclear. One month later, Pakistan security forces arrested him at the house after receiving reports that he was acting suspiciously. Inside, according to a Pakistani security official, investigators found an electrical circuit that could be used as a bomb detonator; a desktop computer that contained aeronautical mapping; and the cryptic 35-page diary, typed in English, with nearly daily entries from March 2 to April 6, 2005.
The Pakistani official said he believed that Mr. Siddique was waiting to be dispatched as a suicide bomber. Phone numbers found with Mr. Siddique have been traced to known members of Al Qaeda, as well as British extremists involved in a failed plot to detonate bombs in London in 2004, the investigator said.
The British police are also investigating whether Mr. Siddique, who was reared in Britain, had ties to the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, officials said. In particular, they are trying to determine whether a diary entry on March 13, in which Mr. Siddique says he has learned that “wagon is now called off,” refers to the July 7 bombing plot.
Mr. Siddique denies having played any role in the failed 2004 plot or the recent London attacks, according to the Pakistani security official. Still, his diary offers a chilling, if fragmented, self-portrait of a young Muslim man not only disaffected with Western society, but with other Muslims unwilling to join in jihad….
Across the top of its first page is a quote from the Koran: “The greatest tests are truly to be soon alleviated.”…
Mr. Siddique has told investigators that he is from the London suburb of Hounslow and is a Muslim of Indian descent. Efforts to locate his family in Hounslow were unsuccessful. The only traces of his former life are school records and a single clipping from a Hounslow area newspaper.
The article, from November 1997, quotes the police as saying that the then 17-year-old Mr. Siddique “ran off to join the mujahedeen” in Lebanon. He returned to his “frantic parents” one month later, the article says. It says Mr. Sidddique suffered from “a depressive illness.”…
He also said he had spent two and a half months in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore with Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani-American computer programmer from Queens, according to the Pakistani security official. Mr. Babar pleaded guilty last year to charges of supplying military equipment to a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan and working to aid the failed 2004 London plot.
While denying involvement in the two plots, Mr. Siddique has told interrogators that he spent the last two years fighting in Afghanistan and Kashmir. His diary offers little sense of what initially drove him to extremism, but abounds with examples of how he views the world through a radical lens. He rails about Pakistanis who “claim 2 b Muslim” but “don’t get it thru there thik heads” that it is their “fard,” or religious duty, to help him wage his holy war.