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BY J. P. TOWLE

Special to the Washington Post

LONDON—Nearly four months after the shooting outside the U.S. Embassy in London that took the life of a young American tourist, questions remained as to the motive of the Pakistan-born taxi driver blamed in the attack.

U.S. and British intelligence officials say there is little doubt Ibn Mussa Ibrahim attacked to protest American foreign policy.

But if so, skeptics ask, why shoot an unarmed civilian? And why was Ibrahim himself later found shot to death and stuffed in the boot of his taxi?

Security cameras outside the embassy captured the attack on video. The tapes show a shadowy, bearded figure behind the wheel of the black London taxi. The cab pulled up at the embassy’s outer gates just before the driver let loose with a spray of automatic gunfire.

The embassy had already closed for the day when 19-year-old Karen Ann Hermann of Oakview, MD, who had just left the building, was caught in the hail of bullets fired from the cab. She died at the scene.

But friends of the 26-year-old cabbie insist he had no interest in politics. Ibrahim immigrated to the U.K. in 1996.

“All he wanted was to earn enough money to bring his fiancée from Peshawar,” said Ibrahim’s roommate, Farid Zacharias. “Al Qaeda? No way. He loved American movies and Burger King.”

An alternate theory is that Ibrahim’s taxi was hijacked before the embassy attack.

“You can’t tell me that’s him in those videos,” Zacharias argued. “It was dark and raining. How can they be sure?”

But security spokesmen say Ibrahim’s were the only fingerprints found in the cab and on the murder weapon, later recovered in London’s High Park.

“We think he was a sleeper, like the Sept. 11 hijackers,” a senior intelligence source said. “Several have been inserted into Western Europe and the U.S. to await assassination orders.”

As to why the cabbie was subsequently killed, it may be because he missed embassy personnel in the April attack.

“Murdering one young tourist probably didn’t pack the political punch his Al Qaeda masters were looking for,” the same high-level source said.