Bilal Patel's letter Time to call our leaders to account (Citizen, July 21) is nothing to do with Iraq, but about his personal obsession and dislike of the Labour government as a parliamentary candidate who lost to me at the June 2001 general election.

To seek to implicitly justify the bombings in London and to link it to Iraq, totally misses the point that Al Quaeda has been growing from Osama bin Ladens' training camps in the Sudan and Afghanistan for the best part of a decade, well before the September 11 2001 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It was this Prime Minister who without the support of the UN Security Council saved tens of thousands of Muslim lives from slaughter in Kosovo by using British forces to intervene.

If Bilal Patel was a responsible Muslim he would be condemning the suicide bombers and atrocities committed falsely in the name of Islam, not blaming this government for the actions of 'brainwashed' fanatics.

Mark Hendrick MP

The Constituency Office

Sedgwick Street

Preston