Jamaican police interview father of London bomb suspect

Police in Jamaica have interviewed the father of 19-year-old London suicide bomb suspect Germaine Lindsay, the British High Commission said today.

Lindsay, believed to be the fourth bomber who carried out the July 7 attacks, was born in Jamaica but left the Caribbean island when he was a baby, the Jamaican government said.

British authorities identified the suspect yesterday as Lindsay.

That name appeared when Jamaican officials checked the island’s birth records, Sandra Graham, press secretary for Jamaican prime minister PJ Patterson, told The Associated Press.

“He is a Jamaican. What I know is that the young man was born here and he left Jamaica when he was five months old,” she said.

Information Ministry spokesman Granville Newell said Lindsay apparently left Jamaica with his mother for Britain, where his Jamaican father was living at the time.

The father later returned to Jamaica and was believed to be living near the capital, Kingston, Newell said.

A man who said he was Lindsay’s father told local radio RJR that he had not seen his son since the boy visited Jamaica when he was 11.

“He was quiet and calm and has his head screwed on,” Nigel Lindsay, 45, said. “This was quite a surprise to me.”

He said he lost contact with his son over the years but the two began having weekly telephone conversations in 2004 that ended two months ago. In one conversation, the younger Lindsay confided he had become a Muslim, the father said.

Jamaican police interviewed the father on Friday and Saturday at Scotland Yard’s request, British High Commission spokesman Mark Waller said.

British police said Lindsay died in the worst of the suicide attacks – the Tube bomb that killed at least 26 people between King’s Cross and Russell Square stations.

ABC television reported yesterday that the FBI was looking into possible ties between the younger Lindsay and unidentified people in New Jersey.