The trail of death that led from Britain to Israel

Each morning, the rotund figure of Asif Mohammed Hanif left this ordinary house in suburban London to make his way under the scream of jets landing at Heathrow airport to attend business studies classes at a nearby college.

Some 140 miles away, in the heart of Derby, Omar Khan Sharif, a quietly devout Muslim and respected father of two children, would be seen walking from his house to the Jamia Hanfia Taleem mosque to offer up his daily prayers. On the way back, he would pop in at a local corner store for a chat.

They were the ordinary lives of two men in modern Britain – one was planning a career in business, the other was dedicating himself to work within the small Pakistani community where had spent all but two years of life.

Then they disappeared. Hanif, 21, announced three years ago that he was going to Damascus to study Arabic. Sharif, 27, was last seen in Derby just over a month ago.

When they resurfaced, in Tel Aviv, Israel, it was to establish two murderous and extraordinary firsts amid the smoking ruins of Mike's Place at 1am on Wednesday.

The two unremarkable men in their unremarkable houses had staged the first suicide mission launched from Gaza in the 31 months of the intifada by blowing up a packed bar, leaving three people dead and more than 60 wounded.

More significantly, the first attack carried out in the name of the Palestinian cause by two people wholly foreign to it.

The ramifications of their actions were being felt yesterday across the political power centres from London and Washington to Jerusalem and Damascus and to the two nondescript streets in Hounslow and Derby from where the bombers had come.

It had started on Tuesday afternoon in the dry heat of the Gaza Strip, with the perfect cover story to get their battered taxi waved through the military checkpoint into Israel. They coolly explained to the Israeli soldiers that they were tourists travelling with the Alternative Tourism Group, a company specialising in tours to "gain deeper insight into the difficulties facing grassroots peace initiatives in the Middle East".

It was a perverse choice of lie. As his way into Mike's Place was blocked by a security guard, Hanif, 21, the "war tourist" from west London, detonated a suitcase bomb packed with nails.

Moments earlier, his travelling companion, Sharif, 27, had pulled out of the attack, apparently after realising that the explosive vest he was wearing was not functioning.

For the shadowy power brokers of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, it was confirmation of long-held suspicions that a nebulous Islamic terror network with connections from Syria to Pakistan had found a rich recruiting ground in the terraced streets of British towns and cities.

For the Hanif and Sharif families in Britain, it brought utter bewilderment as the passport photographs of a father, brother and son was plastered over front pages and television screens across the country. Taz Hanif reflected the shared utter disbelief as, on the doorstep of the family home, he said of his brother: "He was just a big teddy bear. How did this happen?"

The answer to that question lay in the complex web of radicalisation, deception and cunning which brought two "martyrs", the son of the entrepreneur who brought kebabs to Derby and a business studies student from Hounslow, to the Tuesday night jamming session at Mike's Place.

It is a story that brings together a quiet student who left his comprehensive school under the flight path of Heathrow to study Arabic at Damascus University with a British Muslim whose childhood had been thoroughly Western but converted to ascetic Islam after he went to university in London.

Sharif, who attended Repton Preparatory School in Milton for two years, arrived at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport in early April. He was understood to have travelled around Israel before arriving in the Gaza Strip around a week ago, almost certainly accompanied by Hanif, who left Syria a fortnight ago, in a taxi.

The Palestinian owner of one of the taxi companies that ferry people between the Erez border crossing with Israel and Gaza City said he saw the two cross into Gaza from Israel at 2.30pm on Tuesday 22 April.

He described two men who matched the photographs on television: one dark with a heavy beard, the other with lighter skin, clean-shaven with long straight hair. He said he watched the two arguing with a taxi driver over the price for a journey to Rafah.

It was here that they possibly met up with the militants of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, part of the Palestinian Fatah movement, and the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, who claimed responsibility for the Tel Aviv bombing. Whether the two men had met before they travelled to Israel or Gaza was unclear but it was only when they were ready to launch their attack that they appeared in public.

In the maze-like network of settlements, checkpoints and security fences that divide the occupied territories from Israel, the men needed to disguise their motives well. The twin activities of peace activists and the Alternative Tourism Group provided that conceit perfectly.

Just days before they are believed to have carried out the bombing, Hanif and Sharif were seen visiting the spot where Rachel Corrie, an American human shield, was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer. A witness remembered speaking to the two young men with heavy British accents.

Streams of international peace activists were converging that day on the city of Rafah, where Ms Corrie was killed, to mark the end of the 40 days of mourning ­ an Arab tradition. If the men wanted to meet Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, they could have slipped in with the activists.

They left their trail across Gaza. A source connected with human rights work in Rafah, a European who asked not to be named, said he spoke with the two men at the spot where Ms Corrie died last Friday, in the dusty outskirts of Rafah, where giant cactuses grow and buildings across the border in Egypt can be seen. It is a dangerous place. The Israeli army regularly fires into the Palestinian houses here, and sends bulldozers to demolish them, claiming that they are used by Palestinian militants to shoot at soldiers on the border.

The men told those they spoke to, including a group of the international peace activists, they were with a tour by the Alternative Tourism Group (ATG), a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to expanding visitor numbers to Palestinian areas. Among the tours it offers to give "a unique insight into the complex historical, cultural, social, political and religious aspects of the Holy Land" are two that pass through Gaza City. Both offer a panel discussion with "leftist and Islamic leaders" and "various political opposition groups".

At the time when the two Britons were spotted in Gaza, ATG had its tour group, including four UK passport holders, in the area. The company's managing director, Rami Qasis, has denied that Hanif or Sharif had been part of the group, pointing out that the four Britons on the tour had left Israel by the time of the bombing. Indeed, it is much more likely that the two men used the name of ATG among a number of "excuses" to be at the heart of Palestinian extremism. The cities and refugee camps of Gaza are the militants' most fertile recruiting grounds: one of the most crowded places on earth, packed with young Palestinians with no jobs, living far below the poverty line, and with nowhere else to go.

Unless, that is, you hold a British passport. On Tuesday afternoon, a week after they had entered Gaza, the men passed through the checkpoints. Around an hour later they would have been in Tel Aviv, making final preparations for the attack which killed Yanai Weiss, 46, a musician, 24-year-old Ran Baron, and Dominique Hess, 29, a Frenchwoman who emigrated to Israel.

Tel Aviv police said yesterday that Hanif's suitcase had contained a medium-sized device packed with nails and shrapnel designed to inflict the worst possible wounds.

As ambulances poured into the broad beach-front avenue outside the bar, Sharif managed to pull free of the people trying to detain him amid the screaming and carnage in the bar. The tall Briton ran towards the nearby American Embassy, leaving his coat and the explosive vest he had been wearing in a pile on a street corner.

Witnesses said it seemed that there had been a malfunction with the device which caused Sharif to abort his role in the attack. Others suggested that he had had a last-minute crisis and "chosen life".

Last night, it was the vital point of difference between the two lives that were supposed to have been obliterated in an instant to prove, in the words of the statement claiming responsibility for the killings, that "nobody can disarm the resistance movements".

But it was the similarities between the two men that were perhaps the most telling.

Friends and relatives of Hanif said he had developed an interest in politics by the time he left Cranford Community College in Hounslow in June 2000, where he was remembered for passion for spiritual matters and his love of cricket.

Some friends suggested last night that when he was 16, during his time at Cranford, he had also worked in a duty-free shop at Heathrow airport, near his home. It was suggested he had worked for a company called Alpha Retail from August 1998 to December 2000.

John Phillips, a spokesman for BAA Heathrow, said Hanif was employed by an outside firm, not the airport. "He would have been subject to the same kind of checks as any person, employee or passenger, passing through the airport."

After gaining a distinction in his business studies GNVQ, he surprised friends with the news that he had decided to study Arabic at the University of Damascus, Syria, for five years.

He told one of his friends that he intended to become a full-time Islamic scholar and informed his brother Taz that he was planning to return to London as a teacher.

In the meantime, he travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to "discover his culture". There is a suggestion that he studied Islamic jurisprudence in Morocco before reaching Syria.

His parents, who left Britain last year to travel to Mecca, were last night thought to be still unaware of their son's death after they returned to their native Pakistan. Neighbours suggested that another influence on Hanif's mindset may have been his father's illness. He suffered a series of strokes which left him paralysed, some said, and needed constant care ­ a responsibility which his son helped to carry.

For Omar Khan Sharif, the transformation from a Westernised existence was equally abrupt. He is the son of a wealthy businessman, Sardar Mohammed Sharif, who arrived from Pakistani Kashmir to set up a string of businesses in the Normanton area of Derby, including a launderette and, reputedly, the first kebab shop in the city.

The ambitions of his parents for him were reflected in their choice of school. Dating back to 1557, Repton Prep School can count Roald Dahl, Christopher Isherwood and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Ramsey among its famous former pupils.

No one at the school could remember yesterday why Sharif was eventually expelled from this distinguished establishment at the age of 13.

He went on to attend the local comprehensive, Bemrose Community College, which takes 720 of Derby's most difficult inner-city children. Despite the change in station, and an attitude, according to his teachers, of wilful under-achievement, Sharif was an academic success, and went on to university in London, where he met his Middle Eastern wife.

On his return to Derby four years ago, things had changed. Married with two young children, the couple were clearly immersed in Islam. Mrs Sharif wore a burqa and covered her head, while her husband had grown a beard and wore traditional Arab clothes. In October, around the same time that the al-Muhajiroun group of Islamists led 200 people through the city urging support for "their brothers in Palestine'', he moved out of his family's £125,000 Victorian home into a shabby terraced house on nearby Northumberland Street, where his older sister Nasreen was also believed to live.

While his elder siblings, Mahmooda, Zahid, Parvez, Parveen and Nasreen, saw an Islamic tradition in a moderate sense, he seemed to become more deeply involved. He regularly attended a small mosque on Weston Road just minutes away from his home, called the Jamia Hanfia Taleem mosque. It was rumoured that he had become involved with the hardline al-Muhajiroun.

He was last seen in Derby only a month ago.

Friends, family and neighbours remained mystified over what had transformed Hanif from a withdrawn, serious-minded man with an interest in politics and religion to a multiple murderer. Most believed that his developing concern for the Palestinian cause turned into raging anger during his time in the Syrian capital.

But a friend of Hanif insisted: "He was a very gentle person. He just wanted to improve himself as a human being. He was quiet, not an extremist or anything like that. He didn't have a political agenda, he was more into the spiritual side of Islam."

Back behind the doors of the house in Hounslow where Hanif had lived, his brother spoke for many. Taz Hanif said: "We used to watch the news and our parents said the suicide stuff is not good. What do you achieve by killing yourself and killing other people?"