Twenty years on

Thoughts on the 7/7 bombings

Posters seeking information in the wake of the bombings

It was my first week at The Times and the day after my mum’s funeral. This is part of what I wrote that afternoon, even as the news changed:

“ON THE fringes of Central London the news of a bombing doesn’t break, it seeps. The first clue is the crowd at a bus stop which, on a normal day, has just a small queue. Then, a few hundred yards away at a different stop, another crowd, and this means that the Tube station is closed. Up the hill, close to another station on another line altogether there are more people at more bus stops, so something bigger is wrong. Two ambulances and a police car chase each other in the direction of town.

In Tesco’s, the man from the clothes shop has heard a rumour that there has been a power surge on the Underground. But a couple of women, he says, have just told him that it might be a bomb.

Later, as the scale of the attack becomes clearer…

“A relative in Hampshire phones to see if we are OK, which seems unnecessary given that we are four miles from the nearest incident. But his daughter is in London and I realise that it could be reassurance that he is after...

J’s mum is next. She is in East London. Can we pick him up? She has no idea when she’ll get home. Of course, I tell her. There must be thousands of calls like this being taken right now. And it is becoming increasingly obvious from the news that some of these calls will not be answered. The radio says two are dead.

On the websites the rumours have started. There have been bombs in Rome and Budapest. Someone’s friend, “who has no reason to lie”, has heard that Muslims have been “celebrating” in Luton. A mosque has been attacked in Hitchin. On the BBC website there are the first messages from people who were on the trains that, it is now clear, were bombed, or who were near the bus. It is beginning to sound medium bad, worse than any IRA outrage in London’s history, but nothing like as bad as Madrid [a year earlier a series of blasts on commuter trains had killed 183 people]. Or is it?

My second daughter’s school calls and asks us to pick her up early. Right now in fact. Meanwhile, people stuck in London are seeking advice on the internet. How long, one asks, would it take to walk from the City to Chingford? You only have to hoof it for the first couple of miles, someone replies, after that you should be able to get a bus. Lifts are sought and, sometimes, offered.”

The piece ended…

“One of the problems for terrorists, especially in a city such as London, is that there is an absolute difference between being one of the relatively few people present when a bomb goes off and being one of the many hundreds of thousands who experiences it as a series of inconveniences, rumours and minor worries. There will be parents, lovers in parts of suburbia, or in an Italian town or Caribbean village, for whom Thursday July 7, 2005, will have become the worst day of their lives. For the rest of us, the streams of our lives will flow around this obstacle, as around every other.”

The 7/7 bombers at Luton station on their way to London

But did they?

It was true and not true. In addition to the four suicide bombers 52 people had died and 700 had been injured, many terribly maimed– by far the highest casualty toll from a terrorist attack in London’s history. I knew none of the dead but a few weeks after the bombings, by our local church, I met a man who I regularly used to say “hello” to. Now he was in a wheelchair. He’d been on the tube near King’s Cross and his leg had been blown off.

Then there was the shock of discovery. The first assumption had been that, like 9/11, these would be foreign-born attackers, sent by Al Qaeda to murder us. When it turned out that three of these young men – two of whom were still teenagers - were British born and from Leeds, there was what you might almost call a slow trauma. The ringleader, 30 year old Mohammad Sidique Khan was a teaching assistant. Shehzad Tanweer was a cricket-loving student whose dad owned a chippie. Hasib Hussain, who exploded his bomb an hour after the others on a bus near Euston was 18.

The cricket-lover’s death tape

Only Germaine Lindsay – 19 from Aylesbury – had been born abroad, in Jamaica. Lindsay had been radicalised by a preacher whose wife I had interviewed two years earlier for a Channel 4 documentary on Muslim antisemitism. The media, she told me was run by Jews and exhibit one was the fact that Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell were Jewish. I told her Murdoch was an Australian gentile. “Oh”, she said, “I thought he was Robert Maxwell’s son”. So deadly silly. Before 9/11 writers had made fun of people like this.

Londoners had endured plenty of terrorist attacks before 7/7. The 70s, 80s and early 90s were punctuated by IRA and INLA bombings and shootings, the worst being the Hyde Park and Regents Park bombings in 1982. In 1993 the shockwave from the Bishopsgate bomb had lifted the floor of our bedroom in Kentish Town several miles away. By 2005 the litter bins in stations had long been removed and the luggage warnings had been in place for years. We had been looking out for something suspicious for so long - a suitcase left unattended - that we had almost forgotten why we were doing it.

But this was different. In the past there was always a “target” and the bombers and shooters always sought to survive. But on 7/7 four young Britons thought it a blessed act to kill themselves in order to murder as many of their fellow citizens as possible. It was almost intimate. The suspicious package was now a person; a fellow traveller.

Dan Biddle was in a carriage on a Circle Line train. Standing near him, a few feet away was Mohammad Sidique Khan. Dan told the BBC, “As as we pulled out of Edgware Road station, I could feel somebody staring at me. I was just about to turn around and say, 'What are you looking at?', and I see him put his hand in the bag. And then there was a just a brilliantly white, bright flash - heat like I've never experienced before."

Dan lost both his legs and suffered multiple internal injuries; six other passengers in the carriage with him were killed.

The business of identifying the dead and badly injured was a slow one. Posters went up with photographs asking whether anyone knew the whereabouts of missing relatives or friends. Flowers appeared outside stations. The spirit of the Blitz – “bloodied but unbowed” was invoked yet again. And it was surprisingly true. Within days Londoners were on the trains and buses again.

But it wasn’t quite the same. Anyone male, young and Asian looking became suspect. Anyone insensitive enough to carry a rucksack was a fool. If there was room in the carriage you moved discreetly away from the man who might just be there to kill you. It must have been horrible for those people to see – as some must have – this quiet identification of them with the 7/7 killers.

Jean Charles de Menezes

21/7

It got worse. It's often forgotten but two weeks after 7/7 it so nearly happened again. I was traveling through Kennington and Stockwell for a BBC2 film I was making about religion in politics and suddenly the 7/7 scenes were being repeated: sirens, blue lights, crowds outside tube stations.

Five men, four originally from the horn of Africa and one from Ghana, had taken backpack bombs made to the same jihadi recipe as those detonated by the 7/7 bombers on to the Underground and a London bus. One went to Warren Street, one to Oval, another to Shepherd’s Bush, yet another on to a bus in Hackney, the fifth took fright and abandoned his bomb in a small park in West London.

These bombers had made mistakes in the preparation of their devices. The chemical they’d bought was too diluted. Otherwise the carnage of 7/7 would have been repaeted. If it had I can’t help wondering whether what we saw after Southport last year might not have taken place in 2005.

21/7 spooked us all, including the security services. The next day police thought they saw one of the 21/7 suspects, Husain Osman, and tailed him into Stockwell tube station where he got on a Northern line train. He was followed by armed police and shot eight times. On the day some witnesses said that he had been wearing a bulky jacket and that wires were protruding from it. It wasn’t true; the dead man was a young Brazilian electrician called Jean Charles de Menezes. The police were at gievius fault, but for me de Menezes was the 53^rd victim of the 7/7 bombings.

The Muslim question

The polling began. In a YouGov poll in late July 2005 63% of Britons believed that “a significant number of British Muslims feel no loyalty to the UK”. Another YouGov poll a year later had nearly 20% of non-Muslims believing that a large proportion of British Muslims would condone terrorism, compared with 10% a year earlier. Older people were particularly worried.

A series of polls of Muslims though showed something very different, but with nuances. Over 95% condemned the bombings outright, though up to a quarter had sympathy with the bombers’ motives but not their actions. Asked about Britishness 83% of British Muslims identified as British and 86% said they felt they belonged in Britain – a higher figure than for Britons generally.

There was something else too. The studies indicated that where Muslims had greater contact with non-Muslims there was less sympathy for extremism. This is the almost invariable rule.

20 years on and some commentators - step forward yet again Professor Von Pooter - have used the 7/7 bombings as they have the grooming gangs as a stick to beat migration (pointless in this instance, of course). And in the atmosphere today where parties and news outlets vie in their enthusiasm to deport asylum seekers, illegal migrants and to highlight any crime committed by a foreigner, and where a former prime minister can nod along to praise of someone like Tommy Robinson, I wonder whether we would keep the cohesion and common sense that we showed after 7/7 if it were to happen again.

These days there’s money and votes in hatred. There’s Musk and the prophecies of “civil war”. There’s the way Gaza metastasises into our politics. It all feels more fragile than 20 years ago.

Fingers crossed that our security services stay a step ahead and that some of our politicians stay sane.

In memoriam