LEEDS, England, July 13 - In the gritty, working-class suburbs of Leeds, Shahzad Tanweer, 22, was the fun-loving, rich kid of the neighborhood, the son of a savvy, Mercedes-driving shop owner.

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Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Youths congregated Wednesday on a corner in the Holbeck section of Leeds. In Holbeck and Beeston, diverse, working-class neighborhoods, tensions between whites and residents of South Asian origin often run high.

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Ian Hodgson/Reuters

Bashir Ahmed, center, an uncle of the bombing suspect Shahzad Tanweer, said Wednesday in Leeds that his nephew "loved his country."

Hasib Hussain, 18, who lived nearby, was the impressionable one, a charming young man who had been drifting into a reckless teenage life until religion set him straight.

And Mohamed Sadique Khan, 30, was the grown-up one, with a wife and a baby daughter at home. The three men used to work out together at the Hardy Street mosque in Beeston, the Leeds neighborhood that two of the suspects called home.

As the identities of these suicide bombing suspects slowly emerged Wednesday behind a thicket of disbelief, the question that nobody in these neighborhoods could answer was this: What kind of radical force threw the three men together, with another bomber, to commit such a heinous crime against their country, the one they rooted for in soccer matches, and their people?

"It still hasn't sunk in yet that these people could have perpetrated something like this and actually came from our community," said Hanif Malik, spokesman for the Hamara Community Services Center in Beeston. "The tensions in this town are not based on religion, but on economics and culture."

Bradford, a community nearby, had riots a few years ago, as did Leeds, though on a smaller scale, and tensions between whites and South Asians often run high in the Holbeck and Beeston neighborhoods, home to many of Leeds' Muslims, residents said.

Many local businesses are owned by people of South Asian origin, a source of resentment among many whites. Last year a white teenage boy was stabbed to death by a group of South Asian teenagers, and the hard feelings have deepened since then.

Some whites make no attempts to hide their disaffection, and say relations are only likely to worsen. "Make them all go back," said David Swaine, 23, of Beeston.

In many ways, the two youngest suicide bombing suspects, Mr. Tanweer, 22, and Mr. Hussain, 18, were British to the core, shaped by their diverse, rough neighborhoods, where flashy cars, petty teenage battles and designer clothes jostle with the Muslim values of work, family and religion. But in the last year or two, friends said, they had noted a turn toward Muslim piety in each man; nothing shocking or obnoxious, just something plain to see.

Mr. Tanweer, a university-educated cricket fanatic who also excelled in soccer and whose father ran a successful fish and chips shop, had taken to praying five times a day, something his relatives did not do, and attending a number of mosques regularly, acquaintances said. He even went to Pakistan last year to visit relatives and study religion, and some media reports said he visited Afghanistan on the same trip.

"He went to Pakistan," said a friend who works for a local greengrocer in Beeston and asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals. "But a lot of people go to Pakistan. So? The lads used to tease him that he was going there to get married. I think he went for six weeks or something."

Forensic evidence indicates Mr. Tanweer was on the subway train at Aldgate.

"The family is shattered," said Bashir Ahmed, 65, Mr. Tanweer's uncle, who walked toward Mr. Tanweer's house, which was roped off by police tape. Mr. Tanweer "loved his country," he said. "He loved this community. I thought his only interest was cricket. He was not especially religious. Our family does not have a future in this community now."

Mr. Hussain, an average student who graduated from Matthew Murray Vocational School in 2003 and was attending Thomas Danby College, the equivalent of the last two years of high school. He had also begun to shake off Western habits, even more abruptly than his friend Mr. Tanweer. A tall, shy teenager, Mr. Hussain, who lived in Holbeck, had taken up with a rough Pakistani crowd in his high school years, the kind of young people who brawled with white kids over girls and perceived slights. Classmates said he was relatively docile, until provoked, then he could become violent.