Mastermind ‘may have instructed more bombers’

Now the police know the identities of the four suicide bombers, the search is on for the mastermind behind the bombings.

Security experts said the first suicide bombers to hit western Europe would have received training and direction from a more senior Islamist militant.

That raised the prospect that a master bomb-maker was still at large and prompted questions about whether future suicide bombers had already been armed and instructed.

Detectives believe the suspects probably lacked the expertise to plan the operation or construct the bombs themselves and were more likely to have been recruited by a more senior figure.

One senior security source said: "Where is the person who had the expertise to organise it all? There is the possibility that it could be al-Qaida someone who would have been sent to the country to do the preparation and then would have left the day before the attack.

"Is the capability to mount an attack still somewhere else?"

Terrorism lecturer Professor Paul Wilkinson said he believes the men were expendable pawns in an international al-Qaida operation.

"I just don't believe this would have been four young men acting on their own. There would have been another person who primed and guided them and lured them into extremism," he said.

British Home Secretary Charles Clarke said: "I certainly think we have to organise ourselves on the basis that there are other people prepared to act in this way."

Police and the security services fear the bombers could have been acting on the orders of an al-Qaida mastermind and there may be another bomb team waiting to strike.

Asked whether he believed they were part of a larger cell, Mr Clarke said: "A central hypothesis which has to be tested and investigated is that the individuals we know about were working within a wider community."

Mr Clarke, meeting European Union interior ministers in Brussels yesterday, also revealed that police were examining telephone records in the hunt for the bombers' accomplices.

Mr Clarke is seeking Europe-wide agreement on the retention of mobile phone and e-mail records which would help future anti-terrorist investigations.

"I argue that it is a fundamental civil liberty of people in Europe to be able to go to work on their transport system in the morning without being blown up and subject to terrorist attack," he said.

The bombers appear to be the security services' worst nightmare, so-called "clean skins", apparently ordinary young men below the intelligence radar.

The Muslim Council of Britain said it was stunned that those claiming to share its faith seemed to be behind the attacks. "Nothing in Islam can ever justify the evil actions of the bombers," secretary-general Iqbal Sacranie said.