Free Sleeper Cell by Alan Porter Page A

brazenly bare-faced, ran along the pavements.
    They were heading for the mosque on Whitechapel Road.
    Faran glanced at the time on his phone as he put it in his pocket. It was 9.20. Maghrib prayers would be under way. Raised voices seemed to surround the building now.
    He locked the front door behind him and looked out of the window at the rear of the buildings. Below was a small car park and a row of houses that were mostly occupied by Pakistani and Bangladeshi families. A group of white youths had crowded around an old Nissan Micra, rocking it from side to side. Inside, a woman in a hijab was frantically trying to get the car started. She succeeded and reversed, hitting a Mercedes parked on the other side of the car park, before screeching away. The men jeered. One of them looked up towards where Faran was standing and he let the curtain fall back into place.
    On the first floor, directly below Faran’s tiny attic flat, lived a group of three, sometimes four, women. As he passed, he knocked on the door. No one answered.
    ‘It’s Faran from upstairs. You all OK in there?’ he shouted. He heard a movement inside but no one spoke. He would check on them again when he returned.
    Outside it was still hot, the air heavy with an approaching storm. Faran looked along Vallance Road before slipping out, keeping close to the wall as he made his way towards Whitechapel Road. He ducked into an alleyway thirty yards or so from his front door as another van sped past.
    At the junction he stopped. From just beyond where he stood the street was gridlocked. Several drivers were already trying to do three-point turns to head back out of the chaos.
    The mosque was about two hundred yards away on the other side of the road. A crowd of a hundred or more people had gathered outside and more were joining all the time. There were a few placards and banners, but most of the people there were happy just to shout abuse at the building and leave it at that. It was those joining the back of the group who looked more intent on mayhem. Most wore balaclavas or scarves pulled up over their faces. One had a grainy enlargement of the ‘This Is Islam’ image taped to a placard.
    He took out his phone and began to film the scene.
    Police sirens approached from behind him. A riot van peeled off down Turner Street to get to the far end of the mosque while a patrol car stopped near the back of the crowd. The two uniformed officers abandoned their vehicle and began to run towards the building.
    Faran followed, keeping close to the shop fronts, always alert for escape routes. He held his phone out in front of him, trying to keep a steady image on the screen.
    At Davenant Street he stopped again, moving behind a petrol pump on the Shell Garage forecourt. From here he was barely twenty yards from the back edge of the mob across the road.
    The two policemen were fighting their way through the crowd towards the closed door of the mosque. A bottle arced high above the mob and came down just behind the rear officer. The crowd cheered and closed in behind the two policemen. A few seconds later the doors of the building opened a crack and the two men disappear inside.
    More bottles began to fly.
    Across the road a window smashed. The Islamic bookshop on the ground floor of a tall, forlorn-looking building had been spotted by a group of half a dozen youths, some wearing the distinctive S52 emblems on their t-shirts. Two of the gang tore the shattered window out and began to throw books out into the street. Another set fire to the pages of a book and threw it into the shop.
    That was the catalyst that turned what had been a rowdy demonstration into a full-scale riot.
    Three men ran along the pavement with a metal barrier between them and charged at the car showroom next to the bookshop. They battered it until the glass shattered. With no interest in the cars inside, they ran off with their weapon between them and began to attack a clothes shop for no reason other than