A man who lived with a suspected suicide bomber has given an interview to today's Manchester Evening News (MEN), denying any involvement in terrorism.
Yazid Hadj-Azzam, 40, was released by police on Monday after being held by armed officers last Tuesday under the Terrorism Act 2000.
He shared a house in Moss Side with Idris Bazis, 41, a French-Algerian with a French passport, who is believed to have blown himself up in a suicide attack in Iraq in February.
Police questioned Mr Hadj-Azzam's links with Bazis but he tells the MEN he was shocked to discover his former flatmate, who he had lived with for several months, had been involved in a suicide attack. He said he personally rejected fundamentalist violence. He was anxious he would be shunned in his local community and wanted to clear his name.
Mr Hadj-Azzam told the newspaper: "We had separate lives. I don't agree with attacks ... I was working in the night-time and he spent time with his friends so we didn't really talk ... there was never any sign of what he would do. All the time he was quiet."
He said Bazis had appeared to be a "good Muslim" and was respected in the community. Mr Hadj-Azzam said when Bazis had left Manchester, nobody knew he was going to Iraq, and he had "left everything like he was going for a holiday and coming back".
The CIA has warned that the Iraq conflict is creating a new breed of Islamist jihadists who could go on to destabilise other countries.
A report by the agency warned that the situation with Iraq could potentially be worse than Afghanistan, which produced thousands of jihadists in the 1980s and '90s.
