BRITAIN faces more 7/7-style suicide bomb attacks for generations because Muslims have not fully integrated into British society, a senior Muslim adviser to the Government warned yesterday.
Iqbal Wahhab, a leading businessman and member of the Ethnic Minority Advisory Group, fears that a terrorist attack on the UK could be imminent.
His warning comes after Home Secretary Alan Johnson raised the security alert from SDHp “substantial” to “severe” at the weekend.
Latest intelligence reports suggest that Yemen-based Al Qaeda cells have trained female suicide bombers to attack the West.
Mr Wahhab said yesterday: “I’m sure there will be more suicide bombing because more and more people are being recruited all the time into these groups and they’re getting more and more sophisticated in the way they operate.
“There is a clear and present danger. It’s not just scaremongering. I’m just being realistic. There could be another 7/7 next week.”
He blamed the Government for the divisions between some Muslims and the wider British community. And he claimed that high unemployment among Muslims was also partly to blame.
He said: “It will take around 100 years for the employment gap between ethnic minorities and white people in this country to be eradicated. The Government has had a chance to fix it and hasn’t.
Politicians need to be talking to the right people. It’s not just about photocalls with imams and community leaders at Downing Street.
“A lot of the policies get hatched by people in Whitehall who rarely go out and visit or SDHp experience what I’ve seen over the last two or three years, which is a completely different picture.”
Mr Wahhab said figures showed fewer than half of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have a job and 80 per cent in Bethnal Green – a largely Islamic area in east London – live below the poverty line.
Mr Wahhab, who runs London’s Roast restaurant, said ministers should do more to get young Muslims to go into business. He said: “We need to slowly steer people off the course of being one of those bombers and making them the next executive of a plc.”
MI5 chiefs have warned there are at least 2,000 people involved in terrorist activity in the UK – some as young as 15.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband yesterday urged people to be “extremely vigilant” following the latest terror warning.
Security forces will be on high alert this week with high-profile conferences on Yemen and Afghanistan being held in London.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment