LAIR OF EVIL EXCLUSIVE

0 Comments | Sunday Mirror, Aug 8, 2004 | by EUAN STRETCH Chief Reporter

A PHOTO of a young man cradling an AK47 rifle was found inside the London home of Osama bin Laden's suspected UK terror chief.

On the wall behind the camouflaged gunman, whose eyes are obscured for legal reasons, is a map of the Middle East with Jewish place names replaced in Arabic.

The threatening picture was found in the grimy, one-bedroom flat where al-Qaeda's alleged UK chief Abu al-Hindi and four other men were arrested on Tuesday.

The picture could be of al-Hindi himself - or one of those arrested with him over an alleged truck bomb plot on Heathrow airport.

It had been abandoned along with other photographs and personal papers belonging to the men now being quizzed by anti-terror police.

Three of al-Hindi's flatmates in the dingy pounds 780 a month, ground floor flat in Willesden, North London, were Palestinian asylum seekers.

Laptop computers seized from the rooms were last night being examined by police computer experts and Arabic translators.

Today we can reveal that:

-One man had been ordered to train as a suicide bomber with Islamic terror group Hamas.

-Another had got through the first interview stage for a job building Heathrow's Terminal 5 extension.

-The third once lived in a notorious Beirut refugee camp linked to terror groups.

Yesterday the flat - home to a succession of young Arab and Asian men in recent months - lay abandoned, its windows and doors still smashed open after the raid.

By an amazing coincidence the flat was once the home of the IRA's Brighton bomber Patrick McGee and was raided by police in 1984.

Today, the living room wall is decorated with a black Palestinian flag and literature about Palestinian politics is scattered about.

The young men, their Western-style clothing still scattered around the small flat, had raised little suspicion among their neighbours in the quiet, residential street.

One, who lives next door and asked not to be named, said: "The guys next door were normal Asian lads. They used to play football in their back garden and occasionally they would kick it over the fence into our garden. I'm still shocked by the news that I might have been living next to a terrorist cell."

Landlord Michael O'Sullivan, who was in holiday in Ireland when the raid took place, said: "It's come as a complete shock to everyone.I didn't know the men in the flat as it was let through an agency earlier this year. I have co-operated fully with the authorities."

The Sunday Mirror has learned that one of the men is a 19-year- old Palestinian who claims his father is a senior PLO official and friend of its leader Yasser Arafat.

He claims he fled Lebanon after being tortured and forced to join the militant Islamic group Hamas - where he was ordered to train as a suicide bomber.

Another, aged 25, was from the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut - a notorious recruiting ground for Palestinian suicide bombers. The third, aged 22, had got through a first round of interviews to work on the construction of the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

Yesterday security chiefs hailed the arrest of al-Hindi - who operated under a variety of names - as a major blow against al- Qaeda's UK cell. They claimed that he had organised detailed surveillance of key bombing targets in the UK and US and compiled dozens of detailed drawings and diagrams. They also suspect he may have been involved in planning the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

The official report into the tragedy refers to al-Hindi as Issa Al Britani and claims he was sent to the US in early 2001 to identify key Jewish and economic targets in New York. It is thought the US authorities will now seek his extradition.

Last night he was among 11 men aged between 19 and 32 being questioned by police at Paddington Green station. Officers can interview them until this evening. Anti-terror officers had been forced to swoop on his North London address and homes in Luton, Blackburn and Paddington on Tuesday much earlier than planned following a major security blunder. The previous evening the New York Times had reported that al-Qaeda's computer whizz kid and "postman" Naeem Noor Khan had been arrested in Pakistan.

Khan, who is believed to have been co-ordinating a plot to bomb Heathrow, spent three weeks living near the airport. He lived in a ground floor flat with his grandmother in Reading, directly below the western approach flight path.

He was arrested nearly a month ago - and since then he had been secretly working for the Pakistani security services.

In his new "double agent" role he had continued to contact al- Qaeda members around the world using encoded email and they had been put under surveillance.

When his cover was blown, police in Britain knew they had to swoop at once. But they were too late to stop five British al-Qaeda suspects from going on the run.

Despite this, terrorism expert Paul Beaver last night said the arrests are the biggest UK breakthrough against al-Qaeda for 18 months.

He said: "They indicate that the intelligence services have managed to put together profiles of senior al-Qaeda figures in this country and also intercept communications between them.