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London mayor blames West for July 7 attacks

Decades of British and American intervention in the oil-rich Middle East motivated the London bombers, London mayor Ken Livingstone has suggested.
The London mayor told the BBC that he had no sympathy with the bombers and he opposed all violence, but argued that the attacks would not have happened had Western powers left Arab nations free to decide their own affairs after World War I. He said instead of letting them rule themselves they (the colonial powers) had often supported unsavory governments in the region.

"I think you`ve just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil. We`ve propped up unsavoury governments, we`ve overthrown ones we didn`t consider sympathetic. And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s... the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan. They didn`t give any thought to the fact that once he`d done that he might turn on his creators."

Despite the London mayor`s comments, British Prime Minister Tony Blair rejected the using of excuses to explain away the actions of terrorists, and that it is ideologies of hate, not policies, which motivated the suicide bombers. As if to prove the British PM right, the father of one of the September 11, 2001 hijackers praised the recent London attacks.