London - The Luton bomber who struck at the weekend was the first of a wave of Christmas terror attackers, it was claimed on Wednesday night.
Insurgents captured in Iraq told interrogators that al-Qaeda fanatics were planning a series of suicide missions in Europe and the US.
They claimed Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly’s blast in Stockholm on Saturday was just the start.
The warning came amid fears that Abdulwahab, 28, had lured a number of young Muslims into his extremist net during the nine years he spent in Luton.
On Wednesday the bomber’s sister-in-law Nora Gharbi insisted the family were “shocked and angry” about his murderous attack.
She said Abdulwahab’s wife - her sister Mona Thwany, 28 - and the bomber’s three children, Amira, 4, Aisha, 2, and Osama, 6 months, had been in temporary accommodation provided by the local council while police scoured her home for clues.
The warning that other bombers are planning Christmas massacres follows a pattern of previous Islamist attacks.
The shoe-bomber, Londoner Richard Reid, tried to blow up a plane just before Christmas 2001 - and last Christmas Day, University College London student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was caught on a plane with a bomb in his underpants.
Iraqi interior minister Jawad al-Bolani said Abdulwahab’s botched bombing in Stockholm was among alleged plots of which newly-captured insurgents claimed to have knowledge.
The blast was apparently designed to kill and maim hundreds. In the event, the bombs went off early - and incompletely. Abdulwahab was the only fatality, while just two passers-by were injured. The Iraq government said the warnings of other attacks were “a critical threat”. Britain has been given information about the plots, but the Iraqi official would not name the targeted European countries.
Police yesterday finished searching Abdulwahab’s house, without finding evidence of explosives - but will continue examining his computer for information on any accomplices.
The Daily Mail was told on Tuesday by the grandmother of the bomber’s widow Thwany that it was she who introduced her husband to radical Islam.
Thwany campaigns for the full veil to be legal worldwide, and wears one herself.
On Wednesday her sister Gharbi, 24, came out of her home in Luton wearing a black full-face veil to say the family were stunned by Abdulwahab’s suicide blast.
Gharbi, who was born in Algeria, said: “We knew nothing, my sister knew nothing and both the family and her are all shocked. My sister is not extreme, she’s not a radical.”
Abdulwahab has been revealed to have four years ago shocked fellow worshippers at the Luton Islamic Centre with calls for violent Islamist action. Yet police were never told.
On Wdnesday, pictures of Abdulwahab and his wife together emerged. In one image Thwany is shown in Islamic dress at her graduation in 2005 from what is now the University of Bedfordshire.
Her parents, Romanian Christian mother Mihaela and Iraqi Muslim father Abdul, were there to see her receive a degree in psychology. - Daily Mail