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Anxious Muslims Pray in Leeds
A mosque joins the skyline of red-brick rowhouses in the Hyde Park area of Leeds, England, where a peace rally has been called for today.
(By Matt Dunham -- Associated Press)
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He stood outside a friend's market, catty-corner from the crime scene, where police were still operating.
"From what I understand, a 12-year-old lad can go on the Net and make one," he said, referring to finding instructions to make a bomb on the Internet. "You always have to keep an eye on the young, because they need that encouragement, that wisdom, that advice," Hassain said.
Many people speculated on why terrorism spilled into this working-class neighborhood of red-brick rowhouses and mom-and-pop stores where people of many ethnicities live along the narrow lanes and littered alleys.
One young Pakistani cabdriver said he thought the killing of a teenage bully by young Pakistanis last year created a hotbed of racial tension ripe for outsiders to recruit young terrorist foot soldiers.
Hussein, the Turkish systems analyst, said he worried about repercussions from skinheads across town.
Concerns that the local Muslim community might be targeted by vigilantes after the bombings prompted local police and the city council to post fliers in the neighborhood reassuring "all members of our community that harassment of any form will not be tolerated. We will vigorously pursue all offenders."
"I hope people stick together and it don't change," said Michael Jones, 40, a plasterer who has lived here his entire life. "People have a lot of suspicion toward the Muslims because they don't mix, and with them not mixing, people don't understand their religion, and what they don't understand, they're afraid of. It's ignorance is what it is."
Leaflets left on shopkeepers' counters Friday called on "all people of goodwill" to gather Saturday in nearby Hyde Park for a picnic and peace march.
In Voodoo Poochi's tattoo and piercing parlor at the bottom of the steep main road leading past the mosque, Zoe Wood tossed her bright green hair and said she wasn't really going to worry about it all. It didn't surprise her that no one seemed to recognize evil in their midst.
"But everyone's got their secrets, don't they?" she said.
