How the 7/7 bombings impacted British society and why it remains relevant 20 years on

Arab News

6 days ago

LONDON: On July 7, 2005, four men joined millions of commuters during London's morning rush hour, making their way into the UK capital's labyrinthine public transport network.
At around 8:49 a.m., Shehzad Tanweer, from Leeds in the north of England, detonated a home-made bomb on a Circle Line train between Liverpool Street Station and Aldgate.
Within 90 seconds, Mohammad Siddique Khan, also from Leeds, blew himself up on a second Circle Line train between Edgware Road and Paddington station, and Germaine Lindsay, from Aylesbury, bombed a Piccadilly Line train as it left Kings Cross St Pancras, heading towards Russell Square.
The blasts killed 42 people, including the three bombers, and left hundreds more wounded.
Nearly an hour later, at 9:47 a.m., 18-year-old Hasib Hussein attacked the number 30 bus, traveling from Marble Arch to Hackney Wick, at Tavistock Square. The bus had driven via Euston Station, where commuters, exiting the London Underground, had been forced to make alternative transport arrangements due to the earlier attacks on the tube.
The fourth explosion left another 13 people dead, blowing the roof of the double-decker clean off.
Adel Darwish, the veteran parliamentary reporter and historian, recalled that the day had started like any other.
'I was on my way to Parliament. I was waiting for the tube, and then there was some kind of disruption to the network. I took a cab and went to Parliament,' he told Arab News.
On arrival, Darwish recalled how he had been on his way to a briefing about UK involvement in the Middle East on the other side of Parliament Square, when he suddenly became aware of how empty the normally bustling center of British politics was.
'For the first time, you could actually see some special forces from the police with guns. I mean, that is something we're not used to. It's not like America. So, that was something, some kind of feeling of there being something alien that was happening.'
Asharq Al-Awsat columnist Eyad Abu Chakra was also on his way in to work at his central London offices at the time of the attacks.
'When I left home, I saw on teletext that there was an incident on a bus,' he said. 'When I arrived at Waterloo (Station) … it was so crowded. There was a police presence. You could tell there was something big.'
In the days before social media, and in the heat of the confusion, Darwish said information was scarce.
'The telephone networks started to go in and out,' he said, describing how signals were affected by a sudden surge in people in London attempting to contact loved ones and find out what had happened.
Chakra added: 'I started to receive phone calls from colleagues from the Middle East asking me, because they thought that I should know much better than they did. (But) things were so intense, we could not comprehend what was going on anyway.'
The attacks were the first known case of suicide bombings in the UK, and the worst terrorist attack on the country since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988.
In all, 52 members of the public were killed, 32 of whom were British, with others hailing from as far afield as Nigeria and Afghanistan. In addition, 784 people were injured in the blasts.
Despite the onset of the so-called 'War on Terror' following the Al-Qaeda attacks on the US on Sept. 11, 2001, the UK, with its sizable, well-established Muslim communities, had experienced relative stability despite significant British involvement in the Middle East.
However, security services were not relaxed about the possibility of an attack on British soil.
In March 2004, Operation Crevice had uncovered a plot to commit attacks on the UK after police raided properties in four counties surrounding London, eventually leading to five men being convicted of terrorism offences.
Another cell of 13 people was discovered in Luton in August that year after the arrest of alleged Al-Qaeda operative Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan in Pakistan.
Coming in the wake of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and the subsequent toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the motivation for the 7/7 attacks was conveyed via recorded video messages left by the bombers before they set off for London from Luton.
The four, all British citizens, had not been known to the authorities as threats beforehand, the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke confirmed, although it later transpired Khan had links to the Luton cell.
In his address, Khan praised Al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, and blamed Western military involvement in the Middle East and elsewhere for turning him into 'a soldier.'
In his video, Tanweer added that the UK government was complicit in the 'genocide of 150,000 innocent Muslims in Fallujah,' and blamed it for the 'problems in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.'
Arab News Editor-in-Chief Faisal J. Abbas was based in London at the time of the attacks.
'July 7 forced the UK to look into its own backyard and see what has been done in the name of tolerance and freedom of speech,' he said. 'I am referring to hate preachers such as Abu Hamza Al-Masri, who was not only inciting against the UK, but was doing so under police protection.'
Abu Hamza, the radical cleric who preached at Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, notorious for replacing his hands, lost in an explosion in Afghanistan, with hooks, became the focus of attention on extremist rhetoric in the UK.
He was eventually convicted in 2006 of 11 charges relating to terrorism and extremism. The judge presiding over the case said he had 'helped to create an atmosphere in which to kill has become regarded by some as not only a legitimate course but a moral and religious duty in pursuit of perceived justice' in the UK.
The domestic response to the attacks was mixed. The far-right British National Party used them as an opportunity to self-promote, distributing leaflets ahead of a by-election in London just a week after, featuring an image of the bombed number 30 bus.
A report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia said it had identified cases of arson against mosques in the UK after the attacks, and that many Muslims reported feeling nervous to go outside.
Abbas, though, said the response of the authorities to the attack was positive.
'As an Arab and Muslim immigrant to the UK at the time, and a professional journalist who reported on the attacks, I cannot but commend the UK authorities for keeping calm and carrying on; the way the situation was firmly handled but without creating a scare is admirable,' he said.
'I still remember the press conference of the Metropolitan Police's chief, Sir Ian Blair, hours after the attacks, where he refused to associate Islam with terror, and as such, reassuring the majority of British Muslims who didn't endorse such horrendous violence.'
Darwish, too, highlighted the clear and consistent messaging by the UK government under then Prime Minister Tony Blair.
'They were actually approaching community leaders — Christian, Muslim community leaders — in order to make sure that nothing really broke down. So that was actually quite a good move by the Home Office,' he said.
Chakra noted how, even while the incident was ongoing in London, the public remained tolerant and calm.
'(In) this country, there is no knee-jerk reaction. Everybody was so composed, so tolerant, so open-minded,' he said.
'The people reacted with responsibility, with tolerance, with, I think, solidarity … It was an experience I will never, never forget.'
However, he warned that despite an ingrained British sense of 'fair play,' the world was heading in an ever-more polarized direction, and that the UK was 'not immune' to such political trends. The July 7 attacks, he added, had played their part in robbing the UK of its political 'innocence' that once set it apart.
'There is no doubt in my mind that … 7/7 was, in one way or another, the … British scenario of Sept. 11, but of course, on a much smaller scale,' he said. 'However, I think lots of developments took place since then. Globally, we are now seeing lots of events that have been extremely influential in our way of thinking.
'I can never underestimate the danger that Brexit brought to the political scene. I think Brexit was the polite expression of xenophobia, to put it mildly. The 'we and they' scenario in Britain has escalated a lot with Brexit. I think the consensus politics that we used to talk about is gone.'
The July 7 attacks proved a precursor to more major terrorist incidents in the UK. On March 22, 2017, Khalid Masood drove into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, killing four and injuring dozens, then fatally stabbed a police officer outside Parliament before being shot dead.
On 22 May that year, a suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, detonated a homemade device in the foyer of Manchester Arena as crowds were leaving an Ariana Grande concert. The attack killed 22 people, including children, and injured over 100.
Then on June 3 that same year, three attackers drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, killing two people, before crashing near Borough Market. Armed with large knives and wearing fake explosive vests, they stabbed people in the market area, killing six more and injuring 48. All three attackers were shot dead by police.
An independent coroner's inquest into the 7/7 attacks in 2011, overseen by Lady Justice Hallett, found that the 52 victims of the bombers were unlawfully killed, but that no additional security service measures could have prevented the attacks.