Focus: 'I can understand why a young Muslim man would do what Omar is meant to have done'

Many people in Derby cannot accept that a privileged, well-educated boy grew up to be a suicide bomber. But not everyone. Simon O'Hagan reports from the home town of Omar Sharif, who is now on the run

The house in Derby in which Omar Khan Sharif grew up is in a pleasant, sloping street of late Victorian redbrick properties of the kind firmly associated with the urban middle class. Semi-detached with an attractive arched entrance of carved stone, it has a small rock garden at the front and a passageway down one side leading to the rear. There are lovely views looking south across the countryside, with a line of hills in the distance.

When Omar's father, Mohammed Sharif, bought 33 Breedon Hill Road some 20 years ago, it must have seemed a big step up from the smaller, more cramped terraced streets that were where so many of his fellow Pakistani immigrants had made their homes. This was in the Normanton district, and although the edge of Normanton was only at the bottom of Breedon Hill Road, the Sharifs' immediate locale was very different – airier, more refined, more prosperous.

But then Mr Sharif did not want to settle for the lot of the ordinary new arrival from the Asian subcontinent. He and his wife Rashida had ambitions for Omar and their other five children, two boys and three girls. A successful businessman – he was reputed to have opened the first kebab takeaway in Derby, and went on to own other shops – he wanted them to have good educations and to be able to make their way in the world.

Neither parent lived to see the results – Mr Sharif died 10 years ago, Mrs Sharif three years ago – but last week Omar Sharif left a mark in a way that his father, described by a friend as "kind and gentle", might never have imagined. He and another British Muslim, Asif Mohammed Hanif, walked into a bar in Tel Aviv intending to blow themselves up, taking with them as many Israeli civilians as they could. It was the first time in 89 suicide attacks on Israeli targets since the intifada began nearly three years ago that non-Palestinians had been involved. For the security services, it puts British Muslims in a new light.

In the end only Hanif, from Hounslow in London, succeeded in his aim, killing himself and three others when the explosive strapped to him went off. Omar Sharif's didn't. He was last seen running from the scene, and is now the subject of a huge Israeli security forces manhunt. In Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and London yesterday, six people were arrested in the British end of the inquiry.

So how did the 27-year-old Omar Sharif grow up to be a suicide bomber? Why would a young man with a wife and two children do what he planned to do? How could a second-generation immigrant, a British citizen born and brought up here, turn back to his cultural and religious roots and find in them a cause for which both to kill and to die?

The first thing that has to be said about the reaction within Derby's Muslim community to Sharif's attempted suicide bombing is that many remain sceptical as to whether it really was their neighbour who was involved. The discovery at the scene of both Sharif's and Hanif's British passports provided evidence, but in Normanton, people are not convinced. "All we have is the word of one Israeli police officer," a young Muslim man said. "The passport could be a forgery."

Not that others were not prepared to engage with the question of British Muslims getting involved in suicide missions on behalf of the Palestinians – indeed turning it on its head by asking "Why should anybody be surprised?". That was the view of Omar Abdullah, a spokesman for the radical Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun, meetings of which Sharif was known to have attended. "You look at everything that's happened in the world in recent times, and of course there are going to be Muslims who are prepared to carry out attacks like this. British men go off to join the Israeli army, and when they die nobody makes anything of it. The only difference is that the Israelis wear a uniform." Nonetheless Mr Abdullah insisted that his organisation did not promote or condone violence.

The Derby that Sharif grew up in was notable, and still is, for the relative ease with which the various ethnic communities co-existed. Alongside the white population, there are large numbers of Sikhs and Afro-Caribbeans as well as Muslims, and recent arrivals have included people from Kosovo and Somalia. Yet at the local elections last week, the British National Party had a negligible presence in the city, contrasting with what was happening in nearby Stoke and further away in Burnley.

"In the 20 years I've been here, there has mostly been plenty of work in Derby, and I think that has made a big difference," Manjit Singh, a 67-year-old retired teacher, said. "It's a small, provincial city, and people get along." Mr Singh, a Sikh, said there had been one or two minor incidents of religious tension, "but nothing worth mentioning".

According to two men handing out leaflets in the centre of Derby yesterday on behalf of an evangelical Christian church, last year's World Cup brought the city together under one banner. "There were Asian guys wearing the England shirt just like white guys were." At the Byron pub a few yards from the Sharifs' family home on Friday night, there were card games in progress with players of Pakistani, West Indian and British origin.

Nonetheless, each community largely keeps to itself, and within each community it is possible to develop views and affiliations almost unnoticed. That certainly seems to have been the case with Omar Sharif, knowledge of whom is being widely denied among Derby Muslims, in part because his upbringing had been so atypical. The education he received – at a feeder prep school for the public school Repton, and then at secondary school in Derby – was being cited as another reason for incomprehension at what he had done. According to many Muslims, however, it was a wider understanding of the world that laid the seeds of violent revolt. "Take an ordinary impoverished Muslim, and he might be prepared to accept that that is what Allah has decided for him," one Muslim told me. "You see things differently once you have learnt more."

Sharif went on to study at Kingston University in London where he is understood to have met his future wife. Returning to Derby with her, he bought a small terrace house in a street round the corner from Breedon Hill Road in which to bring up their two daughters. A man washing his car a few yards from the front door yesterday said he knew nothing about Omar Sharif.

Whatever fires burned within Sharif they did so with few people being aware of them. But the depth of anger felt towards America and Israel by Muslims of all nations is not to be underestimated, Manjit Singh said. "I can understand exactly why a young Muslim man would want to do what this man is supposed to have done. In fact I'm surprised it hasn't happened more. The American world order is totally unacceptable – it's the haves decreeing how the have-nots should live."

How long before a suicide bombing is carried out by a British Muslim in Britain? One young man distributing leaflets at the Al-Muhajiroun stall in Normanton yesterday allayed fears when he said, "As British citizens we recognise that we have a contract with the government. So no British institution would ever be targeted." Another just said, "I don't know. If I had a crystal ball, I could tell you."