One of the more vivid voices marking the second anniversary of London's July 7 attacks is that of Hassan Butt. He's calling on Muslims to renounce terror, and he speaks from experience: Butt spent years inside what he calls "Britain's jihadi network."
On two occasions, he met with Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, who, like Hassan Butt, was born and raised in Britain. Now in his 20s, Hassan Butt was recruited in the late 1990s, while still a teenager, joining radical Islamist groups that were then little known in Britain.
He traveled to his parents' homeland of Pakistan. There, he recruited others, and most dramatically, called publicly for "martyrdom actions."
Presciently, he predicted in a BBC interview that young Britons who traveled to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban would eventually return to mount terrorist attacks at home. When Hassan Butt returned to Britain in 2002, just a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he was arrested, his passport confiscated, and he was placed under surveillance by British authorities.
Then in early 2006, he made a public break with the jihadi network.
He spoke to Renee Montagne from his hometown of Manchester, England, to talk about the terror network of which he was once a member. The conversation began with the latest, foiled, attacks in Britain, in which the alleged attackers were all either doctors or medical personnel.
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