JULY 7 ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan cut his ties with an Islamic bookshop after it refused to stop stocking lectures by a preacher who condemned suicide bombings.
An inquest into the 52 7/7 victims heard the terrorist ended his involvement in the Iqra Islamic bookshop in Beeston, Leeds, in protest at the continued sale of cassettes of sermons by scholar Hamza Yusuf.
Khan took offence at a lecture Mr Yusuf made after the September 11 2001 attacks on the United States in which he described suicide bombings as “un-Islamic”.
Tanweer Akhtar, who worked at the Iqra bookshop for five months from December 2003, told the inquest: “What I was told was Siddique Khan didn’t like this scholar and didn’t like what he had said, and said we should stop selling his cassettes.
“So as far as I know they had a meeting about him and they decided that the cassettes should stay, that there was nothing wrong with what the scholar was saying.
“But he (Khan) disagreed, he left the bookshop and basically didn’t come back after that.”
Khan, of Thornhill Lees, was the ringleader of the four West Yorkshire suicide bombers, who also included Huddersfield student Jermaine Lindsay.
The inquest into the 2005 London bombings also heard that the authorities took no steps to stop youth workers with extremist views from radicalising children.
Khan, 30, was employed by Leeds City Council as a youth worker and organised activities for youngsters at a Leeds mosque.
