London, England - Islamic leaders accept they must do more to stop impressionable young Muslims becoming would-be suicide bombers, but say the Internet and TV images from the Middle East and Iraq make their task difficult.
News pictures showing Muslims being killed in Iraq or incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. detention centre in Cuba, have angered many of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, who view the country's foreign policy as partly to blame, they said.
Add to that the social deprivation in which many Muslims live, and you have a breeding ground for the kind of radicalism that inspired four young British Muslims to blow themselves up in London last week, killing 53 people.
Some Britons accuse the country's imams of fuelling Islamic radicalism by preaching firebrand sermons in mosques, attacking Western values.
But Daud Abdullah, assistant general secretary of the country's biggest Muslim lobby group, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), said it is a misleading stereotype and imams are not to blame.
"I genuinely believe there are no mosques in Britain, or only a very few, that preach the kind of ideas which might inspire such actions," he said, referring to the attacks.
"You have to look to the college campuses and outside the mosques, where you find groups like al Muhajiroun or the Saviour Sect," he said, referring to two radical British groups.
"We know these groups are out there. It's up to Muslims, non-Muslims, the police and the media alike to isolate them, contain them and make sure their message is not heard."
MOTIVES REMAIN A MYSTERY
Al Muhajiroun gained notoriety three years ago by praising hijackers who carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks. The Saviour Sect hit headlines in April when it gate-crashed an MCB news conference in London just before an election.
There is nothing to link these groups to the London bombers, whose motives have yet to be established. At least three of the four came from the same ethnic Pakistani community in Leeds, northern England, and were described by friends and relatives as peace-loving, friendly and uninterested in politics.
But many experts say the bombers must have been motivated at least in part by British policy in the Middle East and Asia. At least one of them had recently travelled to Pakistan.
"If you want to live in peace over here, then let the rest of the world live in peace," said medical doctor Amjad Ali as he stood outside London's largest mosque on Thursday during a two-minute silence for the victims of the attacks.
"How many minutes of silence would you have to observe if we observed a minute's silence for all the people who've died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Palestine?" he asked.
The MCB says it fears some young Muslims in Britain are being drawn to groups like Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda through the Internet, where they can find a plethora of extremist Islamist websites, many of them run from the Middle East.
"We're talking about a tech-savvy generation. There's not a great deal we can do about it," Abdullah said.
Sheikh Anwar Mady, imam of the London Central Mosque, urged families to help ensure children did not turn to radicalism.
"The family has got a large responsibility in supervising the way their children should behave," he told Reuters.
"Our youths should understand that making decisions regarding big important and public issues should only be the task of the scholars and leaders of the community."