How terror came home on 7/7

New Statesman​

02-07-2025

On the morning of 7 July 2005, I was travelling by train to London Liverpool Street when we were abruptly halted outside Tottenham Hale station. The train was oppressively full; commuters as well as tourists who had boarded earlier at Stansted Airport with cases and rucksacks were standing up in the crowded carriages. To widespread expressions of irritation, the driver announced over the intercom system that there had been some kind of power outage on the London Underground and we would not be moving for some time. The first iPhone was not released until 2007 and information inside the carriage was limited, but as time passed there was a general sense, among the passengers who had been receiving texts and phone calls, that something had gone seriously wrong. In the event, we were ordered on to the platform and told that the line to Liverpool Street had been suspended. Only much later did we understand what had happened: that four bombs had been detonated in coordinated mass-casualty Islamist suicide attacks.
The day before, in Singapore, London had been announced as the host city for the 2012 Olympic Games, narrowly defeating Paris after extensive lobbying from prime minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, Princess Anne, Mayor Ken Livingstone, Sebastian Coe and (inevitably) David Beckham. Blair returned on an overnight flight to London and then went straight to Scotland for the G8 Summit, which was being held at the Gleneagles golf resort. This was the month of Live 8, when Bono and Bob Geldof were lobbying world leaders to ease the debt burden on Africa; at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park, on 2 July, Pink Floyd had reunited with Roger Waters for one more time, one last time.
Blair was in a meeting at Gleneagles when he was informed that what at first was believed to have been a power outage on the Underground network was in fact a series of bomb explosions on the Circle Line near Aldgate and at Edgware Road and on the Piccadilly Line near Russell Square; a fourth bomb, an hour after the Underground attacks, had ripped the roof off a number 30 double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. Blair immediately prepared to leave the summit, with the blessing of fellow world leaders, who included Vladimir Putin. 'What happened in London today is a huge crime,' the Russian despot announced.
In London, Charles Clarke, the home secretary, chaired a hastily convened meeting of Cobra, the government's emergencies committee, attended by Andy Hayman, a Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism specialist, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5. 'The most important message that we wanted to convey,' Clarke told Adam Wishart and James Nally for their account of the atrocities, Three Weeks in July, 'was that the forces of the state were in control.'
But they were not in control. They had no idea what had happened on those Underground commuter trains, and the initial fear then was that the bombers were at large and that more attacks would follow. There had never been a suicide bomb attack in western Europe; IRA operatives starved themselves to death in the Maze prison but never blew themselves up while carrying out their atrocities. The Madrid bombings in 2004, which killed 193 people, were the result of improvised explosive devices left on four commuter trains bound for Atocha station; two of the Islamist militants behind that attack later blew themselves up during a police raid on the apartment where they were hiding out in Leganés. For Ian Blair, then commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a 'door had been opened' into a new kind of terrorism. 'We've been involved with the IRA and Loyalists for a very long time, but never did they do anything the size of this. This was a step change. And once that door has been opened, we would be aware that it can never be shut again.'
Fifty-two people died (excluding the assassins) in the coordinated 7 July bombings and nearly 800 were injured. Some of the survivors whose stories are told in Three Weeks in July had their limbs blown off or later amputated in hospital. Martine Wright, who lost both legs and 80 per cent of the blood in her body in the attack at Aldgate, and who was in a coma for ten days, has since bonded with six of her fellow amputees, creating what they call the '7/7 club'. 'The club you'd never, ever choose to belong to in a million years,' she says. 'But once you're a member, it's a club like no other. The understanding… all you've got to do is walk into a room and see that person's eyes, and you know what they've been through.'
This is not a literary book in the sublimated journalistic style of Emmanuel Carrère's V13 – which followed the long trial, from September 2021 to June 2022, of some of the perpetrators of the murderous Paris terror attacks of 13 November 2015 – or a work of political analysis. But it is a humane, absorbing, meticulous recreation of the events of that July day and the febrile three weeks that followed. It has five chapters, or 'Acts', covering the four bomb attacks in all their harrowing detail, the subsequent investigation into the background of the bombers, the failed 'copycat' bombings (on three Tube trains and a bus) that took place in London on 21 July, and the hunt for the four would-be suicide bombers who fled after their self-made devices malfunctioned. One of them, Muktar Said Ibrahim, who failed his maths GSCE, had miscalculated the ratios of ingredients used to make the explosive devices. From such errors are lives saved – or lost.
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One long sequence covers the appalling killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian who had been tracked by undercover agents after he left his apartment block. He was pursued on to the Underground at Stockwell and then shot in the head by two police gunmen who mistakenly believed he was one of the perpetrators of the botched 21 July attacks.
Adam Wishart, co-author, is a renowned documentary filmmaker (he was director of the BBC's 9/11: Inside the President's War Room) and the book can read like an extended or burnished script with short scenes, recorded dialogue, jump cuts and time shifts. We are taken into the wrecked train carriages as the survivors, surrounded by scattered body parts, twisted metal and debris, and the injured and the dying, struggle to comprehend what has happened. And then we cut to the building where the national police response is being coordinated. The authors capture well the unease that gripped the capital and the country in the days after the identity of the bombers was revealed. Three of them were British Muslims of Pakistani heritage from the Leeds area; they were born and educated in England. The fourth bomber, a 19-year-old convert to Islam, was born in Jamaica. He detonated the bomb deep underground on the Piccadilly Line that killed 26 people.
The four men had driven from Beeston, a run-down suburb of Leeds, to Luton, and from there, carrying their bulky rucksacks, had taken a train to King's Cross. Their leader was Mohammed Sidique Khan, who was 30, married with a young daughter, and trained at a jihadi camp in Pakistan. The bombs had been made in a rented flat in Leeds, and the jihadis had worn gasmasks as they boiled huge quantities of hydrogen peroxide bought from local hardware stores.
After the attacks, Charles Clarke had described them as 'clean skins', presumably because they were unknown to the security services; in fact, Sidique Khan had been bugged and trailed in 2004 but was not considered to be an imminent threat. Complacency and a lack of fastidiousness about the Islamist terror threat enabled him to operate unhindered and to move freely between England and Pakistan. Before the London attacks, he had recorded a video message, released by al-Qaeda after his death, in which he risibly claimed to be acting in 'obedience to the one true God, Allah'.
In 2008, when I was editor of Granta magazine, I commissioned a long report by Richard Watson, a former BBC Newsnight journalist, into what we called the 'rise of the British jihad'. For many years, Watson had monitored the activities of extremist preachers in London, such as Abu Hamza, the hook-handed imam of Finsbury Park Mosque, and Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syria-born Muslim Brotherhood operative who, in the usual naive British way, was given asylum in this country after being expelled from Saudi Arabia. Watson followed the work of Anjem Choudary, co-founder with Bakri Muhammad of al-Muhajiroun ('the emigrants'), which agitated for the institution of sharia law in Britain; it is striking how many subsequent terrorist attacks involved men with links to the group. Mohammed Sidique Khan was one of them, and yet it was not officially outlawed in Britain until 2010.
Watson's work is not credited in Three Weeks in July but perhaps should have been: he was among the first journalists to understand that something deeply sinister was happening in Britain among the followers of the extremist Islamist preachers whom the security services tolerated as cranks even as they conspired and incited.
[See also: The rise and fall of Britain's infamous preacher of hate]
In his great novel about terrorism and paranoia Mao II, published a decade before the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, Don DeLillo provocatively suggested that terrorists had become the primary mythmakers of our age. Bomb-makers and gunmen were creating narratives of disaster – 'midair explosions and crumbled buildings' – that have not only altered the 'inner life of the culture' but made the 'new future possible'. This, he wrote, 'is the new tragic narrative'.
DeLillo is fond of hyperbole and satirical exaggeration, but he also understood something important about modern terrorism, and so did Ian Blair in the aftermath of the London suicide bombings. Today we live in the long shadow of the bombings and all that has followed since: massacres in Paris, Brussels, Stockholm and in the foyer of the Manchester Arena as people were leaving an Ariana Grande concert; the rise and fall of the Islamic State caliphate; the omnipresence of CCTV cameras and intensified state surveillance; the grim, time-devouring security routines we must endure at airports, and so on.
'We talk too much, and too complacently, about the mystery of evil,' Emmanuel Carrère writes in V13. 'Between being ready to die so as to kill or being ready to die so as to save: which is the biggest mystery?' There was nothing mysterious about the London attacks of 7 July 2005. A great evil was done to the people making their way to work in the carriages of the Tube trains that morning and on the bus in Tavistock Square because British men chose to die in the act of killing others. The bombers, who in their megalomania believed themselves to be Islamic martyrs, were blown to pieces – the shattered, headless torso of the bus-bomber landed outside BMA House in Tavistock Square – but their actions have had a long and terrible afterlife. A door had been opened. A new age of domestic terror had begun in Britain. The new future had been made possible.
Three Weeks in July: 7/7, the Aftermath and the Deadly Manhunt
Adam Wishart and James Nally
Mudlark, 384pp, £25
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[See also: Jenny Saville's human landscapes]
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