LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair called on Saturday for a hearts and minds struggle against the "evil ideology" of al Qaeda as the death toll from last week's London suicide bombings rose to 55.
Parents of one of bombers said he may have been brainwashed and appealed for new leads in a fast-moving investigation which has so far linked Britain, Egypt and Pakistan.
Pakistani security services detained two men overnight in the city of Lahore on suspicion of links with one of the four British Muslims who blew themselves up on July 7 on three London underground trains and a bus.
Blair called for a battle of ideas against what he called the fanatical beliefs and perversion of religion behind the London attacks and others around the world by the militant Islamist al Qaeda network.
He said the opponent was an "evil ideology" and a strain within Islam that was altogether removed from the "essential decency and truth" of that religion.
"It is not a clash of civilisations -- all civilized people, Muslim or other, feel revulsion at it. But it is a global struggle. It is a battle of ideas and hearts and minds, both within Islam and outside it," Blair said.
He said claims by militant Islamists to act in the cause of the Palestinian, Afghan or Iraqi people were belied by attacks in those countries in which innocent civilians were killed.
"We should lay bare the almost devilish logic behind such manipulation," he said. "Why, if it is the cause of Muslims that concerns them, do they kill so many with such callous indifference?"
He said such an ideology could only be beaten "by confronting it, symptoms and causes, head on."
Brainwashing
As the death toll from Western Europe's first suicide bombings rose to 55, families of the attackers released statements expressing grief and disbelief.
"We are devastated that our son may have been brainwashed into carrying out such an atrocity, since we know him as a kind and caring member of our family," said the parents of Mohammad Sidique Khan.
"We urge people with the tiniest piece of information to come forward in order to expose these terror networks which target and groom our sons to carry out such evils."
Khan, a primary school teaching assistant, was a 30-year-old married man with a daughter. He had visited the British parliament last year and met a cabinet minister during a trip with his school. Three of the bombers were young British Muslims of Pakistani origin, while the fourth was a Jamaican-born Briton.
Egyptian, Pakistani Links
Pakistani security forces detained two men overnight in the eastern city of Lahore on suspicion of links with another of the bombers, Shehzad Tanweer, bringing the total number of arrests in Pakistan to six.
"We are interrogating whether these two people had any links with Tanweer," an intelligence official told Reuters.
Tanweer had visited Faisalabad and Lahore during two trips to Pakistan over the last two years. Pakistani intelligence sources say that in 2003 he met a man later arrested for bombing a church in the capital, Islamabad.
Officials of two security agencies on Saturday questioned teachers, students and other staff of a madrassah or Islamic school in Lahore which Tanweer was thought to have visited in 2004. The school has connections with Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of Mohammad), a group linked to al Qaeda.
In Egypt, police have arrested a British-trained biochemist, Magdy Elnashar, and are questioning him about the attacks.
But Egyptian Interior Minister Habib el-Adli told the al-Gomhuria newspaper Elnashar was not a member of al Qaeda and that Western and Arab media had drawn hasty conclusions about the arrested man.
Elnashar, 33, left England for a 45-day holiday before the bombings and intended to return, an Interior Ministry source said. He had denied any knowledge of the attacks.
London police chief Ian Blair said he would send officers to Cairo if necessary and may seek Elnashar's extradition.
The Egyptian was a researcher at Leeds University in England, and had also studied in the United States.
British newspapers said he had rented a house in the northern English city of Leeds where police have carried out raids and discovered explosives. The city was home to three of the bombers.
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