Joan Smith: A Big Mac at the Last Supper

With this in mind, the revelation from CCTV that one of the 7 July suicide bombers, 18-year-old Hasib Hussain, ate a meal in the "missing hour" before he died recalled another tableau familiar from Renaissance art - The Last Supper. The mental picture was spoiled when I discovered that Hussain's final meal was consumed in McDonald's near King's Cross station, one of the last places on earth I would expect anyone to choose for a repast of such ritual significance. How many people would feel like a Big Mac if they were preparing to kill themselves and an unknown number of innocent civilians?

Records show that Hussain also made a number of phone calls, at least one of them to another bomber. This goes some way towards explaining how he spent the time between leaving his fellow conspirators and detonating his own device. This is a question which must haunt the relatives of people who died or were badly injured in the No 30 bus blast in Tavistock Square, but it does not answer crucial questions about his state of mind.

Why did Hussain wait 57 minutes to carry out his lethal attack? Why target a bus rather than a Tube train like the others? Did the bomb malfunction? Did he have second thoughts? I would like to think so because the calmness of the four bombers, captured on CCTV as they entered Luton station earlier that morning, has always been chilling. It would be comforting to think that Hussain, the youngest of the conspirators, lost his nerve, but the revelation that he went to a fast food outlet does not fit easily into this scenario.

In countries where suicide bombings happen frequently there are instances of young men (and women) setting out calmly on "martyrdom" missions after months of training by Hamas or Hezbollah. Hussain, by contrast, seems to have behaved like any hungry teenager arriving in a big city and made for the nearest golden arches. Can he really have been so anaesthetised to what he was about to do, or so callous?

Suicide bombing has been used as a weapon not just in Lebanon, Israel, Iraq and Pakistan, where it has become horribly familiar, but in Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers were one of the first groups to adopt it. In Turkey, it was used by Kurdish separatists while another group opposed to the state - secular leftists - embarked on a series of prison hunger strikes in the 1990s in which scores fasted to death. These events have tended to involve such disparate groups, from Islamists on the one hand to hardline Maoists on the other, that they are hardly ever considered as a linked phenomenon. Yet they pose the same question: why are so many young people in this part of the world attracted by the idea of death, their own and other people's?

It is this confusion of two cultures - Middle Eastern suicide bomber and burger-loving British teenager - that makes the mental image of Hussain waiting in line in a fast food outlet, with his bomb strapped to his back, so discordant. Even the fact that McDonald's is for many people a despised symbol of Western capitalism seems to have passed him by, so I don't suppose he's likely to have realised that he and his fellow bombers represent globalisation in a much more malign form: the importation into this country of a suicidal cult that has swept across Asia to catastrophic effect over the past two decades.