British bombers 'smuggled explosive inside the Koran'

The two British Muslims who attacked a Tel Aviv bar last Tuesday, killing three Israelis, smuggled sophisticated explosive material from abroad inside a copy of the Koran, the Israeli Defence Minister said yesterday.

Shlomo Mofaz told his cabinet colleagues that Asif Mohammed Hanif, 21, and Omar Khan Sharif, 27, initially crossed the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, then made their way to Gaza, where they were said to have had contacts in Hamas. Investigators suspect they may have received training in Syria.

With their British passports, they entered through a tourist gate, where security checks are less rigorous than at the gate used by Arabs, the minister said. They enjoyed the same privilege when they crossed from Gaza into Israel on their lethal mission to Tel Aviv.

Hanif, from Hounslow, west London, blew himself up outside Mike's Place, a popular music pub on the Tel Aviv seafront. Israeli police were still hunting yesterday for Derby-born Sharif, who fled the scene either because he had second thoughts or because his bomb failed to detonate.

Six people, including the wife, two sisters and brother of Sharif, were being questioned by police in London yesterday on suspicion of helping to mastermind the attack, which left more than 60 people injured.

In Israel, a magistrate has barred publication of details of the investigation, but border checks on foreigners have been tightened. Security forces are embarrassed that two men with Muslim names slipped in so easily.

This was particularly so with Hanif, whose passport indicated that he was born in Pakistan. A few weeks ago, the Interior Ministry informed all border posts that Pakistan had been added to the list of states whose nationals were barred from entering the country.

But officials no longer suspected that the two bombers had entered Israel under cover of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM), they said yesterday. A spokesman for the movement confirmed that the pair attended a memorial meeting for Rachel Corrie, a human shield crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer.

Ministers have proposed turning back newly arrived activists at the airport and deporting those already here, but ISM spokesmen said that they had heard nothing official to that effect.

In Britain, MI5 officers admitted that they had let the two suicide bombers slip through security checks designed to identify potential hardline Muslim activists after the 11 September attacks.

Despite knowing that both Hanif and Sharif had attended meetings of the radical group al-Muhajiroun, the two men were not considered by intelligence officers to be potential terrorists, sources said.

Special Branch officers were ordered to the Normanton area of Derby, where Sharif lived, after it became clear that the two Britons were probably involved in the bombing.

Officers from Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch arrested the six suspects on Friday evening and early Saturday in a series of raids across the Midlands and London. They were Sharif's wife, Tahira; his sisters, Parveen and Nasreen; his brother, Zahid; Tahira's brother, Amar Jazira; and a family friend, Zahid Ahmed.

They are being held under the Terrorism Act 2000 on suspicion of being involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. They can be held for up to seven days before police must charge or release them.

Officers are thought to be investigating claims that a hardline Islamic cell had established itself in Derby and had sought to recruit young men from the city's Muslim population.

¿ The bullet that killed James Miller, a British television cameraman, in a Gaza refugee camp on Friday entered his neck from behind, although he had been facing an Israeli armoured personnel carrier, according to medical evidence, a spokesman for the Israeli Army said yesterday. The spokesman speculated that a Palestinian gunman might have hit him in an exchange of fire.