LONDON Tapes: Bombers scouted routes

Police said the bombers spent about three hours in London on June 28.
WASHINGTON POST
LONDON -- Three of the four bombers who killed themselves and 52 other people in a July 7 attack on the London transit public system apparently scouted their route on a trip to London 10 days earlier, police said Tuesday.
Officials at Scotland Yard said the three men -- Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Germaine Lindsay -- were spotted by officers reviewing thousands of hours of closed circuit surveillance tapes from train stations in London and the central English city of Luton.
Similar route
Police released photos of the three men, wearing jeans and baseball caps and carrying backpacks, arriving at the Luton train station and the Kings Cross train and subway stations in London on June 28. They apparently were following the same route they took on July 7 when they mounted the deadliest attack on British soil since World War II; in addition to the deaths, 700 people were injured.
Hasib Hussain, who police believe detonated a bomb on a double-decker bus on July 7, was not seen in the surveillance photos released by police Tuesday.
Khan, Tanweer and Hussain were British citizens of Pakistani descent; Lindsay was a Jamaican-born resident of Britain. Police have said they believe all four were young Muslims who had become radicalized. Earlier this month, the Arab news network al-Jazeera aired a videotape of a man identifying himself as Khan saying that the bombings had been carried out in response to British policies in Iraq and the Middle East. "We are at war and I am a soldier," he said.
Message
In a videotaped message aired on al-Jazeera Monday, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two official in the Al-Qaida terror network, said Al-Qaida was responsible for the attacks and had the "honor" of carrying them out. Earlier messages from al-Zawahiri had praised the attack but stopped short of claiming responsibility for Al-Qaida.
In a statement issued Tuesday, police said Khan, Tanweer and Lindsay spent about three hours in London on June 28. Their visit, the statement said, "might suggest the suspects were carrying out reconnaissance of potential targets on the London transport system and checking the time of the journey they intended to take on the day of the attack."
Police said "other cases here and abroad" suggest that terrorists sometimes visit their targets before an attack.