snipped off the northerner:
You knew it was a big story when the US TV crews turned up with the lacquer-haired anchorman. There were Japanese crews too, plus a worried-looking Belgian journalist scuttling past the wheelie bins in the back alley behind Colwyn Road, in Beeston, Leeds, the home of London bomber Shezhan Tanweer.
The media mob grew bigger every day last week and everyone living in the terraced grid of streets was probably interviewed at least twice. At times like this, locals tire of notebooks and lenses pretty quickly and urge us to shove off.
But not in Beeston. After the two-minute silence, staff of the Hamara community centre distributed bottles of mineral water to reporters.As bomb squad teams prised open the shutters of the youth centre on Lodge Lane, a man carrying a bottle of orangeade and pile of plastic cups handed out free drinks to those gasping in the sun.
A reporter from the Yorkshire Post said a local greengrocer had given her a free watermelon. In other hotspots they might well have thrown it at her. And as police searched another house in a quiet road in nearby Dewsbury, a resident saw the sweat on my brow and gave me an ice lolly.
The paradox of Beeston is that this centre of inner-city deprivation, which harboured fanatical suicidal killers, appears also to be a place of multiracial and multi-religious harmony. "This is a beautiful area with lots of different people, ideas, clothes, music. Everyone learns something from each other," said one very young-looking father of six.
Perhaps his glasses would have been rose-tinted, had he been wearing any. But in the shop behind him the Asian British owner (from Swindon) discussed the news with her white British friend (from Cornwall). He promised to help her find a way through the police cordons to the cash and carry.
Beeston, on the basis of a three-day visit, does not feel like Bradford, Burnley or Oldham, scene of riots in 2001 and now the target of government cohesive community strategies. Perhaps, amid the horrors, there are lessons to be learned in Leeds.
i'm very sure the four of em are rotting in hell as we speak.
as enscribed by the letter b @ July 21, 2005 12:33 PM | someone's pinged