The young man in the Islamabad prison is Zeeshan Siddiqui, arrested by Pakistani police in April after they tracked him in contact with some leading al-Qaida personnel, including its supposed No. 3 in the hierarchy, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, now in U.S. custody.

Siddiqui was supposed to be small fry, except for one intriguing connection. At Britain's Cranford community college, he was best friends with another young British-born Pakistani, Asif Hanif, who killed himself as a suicide bomber on an Israeli nightclub two years ago.

And then among the names that Siddiqui let slip under interrogation in Pakistan were Shehzad Tanweer, whom he had met, and Mohamed Sidique Khan, both now infamous as two of the London Underground suicide bombers. And Israeli security sources were cited in a report in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv that Khan had also been involved in the planning of the Israeli attack.

Khan, Tanweer and the third British-born Pakistani of the London bombings, Hasib Hussain, had all visited Pakistan earlier this year. Khan and Tanweer are now thought to have flown there as early as October or November last year, before being joined later by Hussain. Supposedly going for "religious instruction," the Pakistani police now say they were seen meeting militants from Kashmir-based groups, including the banned Jaish-e-Mohammed.

The fourth London bomber, the young Jamaican Jermaine Lindsay, was in Afghanistan four years ago. It was Lindsay who rented the apartment from the Egyptian biochemist, Magdi al-Nashar, now in police custody in Cairo, after British police found that the apartment was being used to store explosives.

But that Cairo connection may have been misleading, throwing up a minor character or even a false trail. Pakistan now seems to be the focus of the British inquiry, and it explains the conviction of British police chief Ian Blair that they will find al-Qaida somewhere at the back of the London bombing plot. And within that plot, the police are trying to track the way British youths of Pakistani origin found their way into the cult of suicide bombing.

One of them, Khan, had already emerged on the police radar screen, as a minor character on the fringes of another inquiry, into a foiled plot to blow up a night club in London's Soho with a truck bomb. After a quick assessment, he was deemed too unimportant a figure to be tracked by an overworked and understaffed MI5, Britain's security service, now making the shift from counter-espionage to counter-terrorism with a bigger budget and a license to double its staff.

Now taking flak in the media for not having kept a closer watch on Khan, MI5 keeps citing a formula made by their French equivalent, a service called Renseignements Generaux, to calculate the number of fundamentalists in a given population. Based on an extensive screening of the French scene, the formula says that in a given Muslim population in Europe, an average of 5 percent would be fundamentalists. And of that 5 percent, as many as 3 percent could be considered as dangerous. That means taking France's Muslim population of 6 million people, there would be 300,000 fundamentalists, of whom 9,000 are potentially dangerous.

Applying the formula to Britain's 1.6 million Muslims would produce 80,000 fundamentalists, of whom some 2,400 would be dangerous. That is more potentially dangerous Muslim fundamentalists than MI5 has agents -- and MI5 reckons that it takes a minimum of a dozen officers to keep close watch on a suspect.

But there are clues and trails to follow, starting with all those deemed of only marginal interest in the Soho nightclub inquiry, and going on to the outlawed Pakistani terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed, which has traditionally raised much of its funding from the Pakistani community in Britain -- and which also recruited another British Muslim, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the London School of Economics student who was convicted of the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Jaish-e-Mohammed's prime concern is the fate of Kashmir, most of it lost to India at partition in 1947. But the British-born militants have other concerns. Omar Sheikh was first radicalized by TV images of the war in Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo. Asif Hanif and his partner, Omar Khan Sharif, were prepared to die for the Palestinian cause as suicide bombers in Israel. Other British militants have been recruited through their outrage at the sanctions against Iraq, or by sudden enthusiasm for Osama bin Laden after the attack on the twin towers and then by the launching of the Iraq war in 2003. And some may have been radicalized by the experience of British society for the Pakistanis of northern England, who are on the whole the least prosperous, the least employed and the least educated of all the British immigrant groups. Whatever the origin of their rage, the Pakistanis of Britain seem to be the main source of Islamist extremism in Britain.

British police have given their Pakistani counterparts the names of 12 British-born Muslim radicals who are thought to have been to Pakistan, and have reported back to London that they have had "good cooperation" with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the head of ISI's crisis management team, is in charge of the British inquiry, and is pursuing claims that while in Pakistan one of the London bombers met an Afghan-trained bomb-maker, Osama Nazir, who is now in police custody.

Despite this official cooperation, Munir Akram, Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations, told a British TV audience Sunday the U.K. government's foreign policies and British society, not Pakistan, were to blame.

"It would be a grave mistake to point fingers at Pakistan or anybody outside your country," he said. "Your policies in the Middle East, your policies in the Islamic world, that is the problem with your society and that is where the problem lies as far as this incident is concerned."

"They were born in Britain, bred there, lived there, were by all accounts British lads. What motivated British lads to do this? It is not because their blood was from Pakistan. Whatever angst they had was a result of living in Britain," he went on. "You have to look at what you are doing to the Muslim community and why the Muslim community is not integrating in British society."

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