Terror plot cop carrying bomb sample warned it was 'fizzing and bubbling'
An explosives expert speaking on the 20th anniversary of the 21/7 terror plot has told of bomb samples smoking and fizzing in a van. Cliff Todd was examining the Leeds 7/7 bomb factory used by the suicide plotters, who had killed 52 innocent people two weeks earlier, when he was told of another attempted atrocity.
Devices due to detonate at around midday had been planted at Shepherd's Bush, Warren Street and Oval Tube stations and on a number 26 bus in Haggerston, East London. Mistakes in the mixture and ratio of deadly ingredients meant the homemade bombs only fizzed and popped instead of exploding.
But the type of explosives used in 7/7 and 21/7 had never been seen anywhere else - making handling them extremely dangerous. A yellow glutinous substance began getting very hot the floors of the Tube carriages and bus when forensic scientists tried to move it. Cliff said: "This stuff was apparently the main charge in an explosive device, this was very alarming behaviour. Naturally and sensibly, everyone backed off."
He told his team to take small samples from each device and destroy the rest in controlled conditions. Cliff, who appears in the new Nexflix series Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, added: "There was a level of fear here, but tempered by educated assumptions, and the urgent need to get enough of the material to test sufficiently to get a proper handle on its composition and properties, in case more devices were ready to be unleashed. Suspects were still at large."
Cliff, principal forensic investigator at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent, was later called by an officer transporting some of the material to the lab. "I got what I can only describe as an agonised phone call from Andy, the SO15 [counter terror] exhibits officer bringing the samples: 'Cliff, the samples are fizzing and bubbling and the van is filling with smoke.' I can't remember exactly what I said, though certainly not what was in my head, which was one stream of expletives.
"The end result of the conversation was that they were not far away, and would just go hell for leather to get to us." And Cliff told his lab staff to be ready to deal with the potentially explosive substance on arrival. On 9 July 2007, Muktar Saaid Ibrahim, 29, Yasin Hassan Omar, 26, Ramzi Mohammed, 25, and Hussain Osman, 28, were found guilty at Woolwich crown court of conspiracy to murder. Each was sentenced to life, with a minimum of 40 years' imprisonment.
A fifth would-be bomber, Manfo Kwaku Asiedu, dumped his device without attempting to set it off and was later sentenced to 33 years. Cliff also said the horrific 7/7 Russell Square bombing in 2005, when 26 people died, had stayed with him, particularly seeing victims labelled with little yellow signs saying"dead". One of the bodies was eerily intact.
Cliff said he wrote his book, entitled 7/7 and 21/7 Delving Into Room 101, to come to terms with the trauma he experienced. He added: "Faced with something that bad, the very last people you want to talk to about it are those you love most - simply because it is so awful; the last thing you want to do is put any of that on them."
Both the 7/7 and 21/7 bombs were a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and an organic material - in the first case black pepper, in the second chapatti flour.
Cliff said: "In my head there is really no question that the two are linked in that they have been given the same information from the same source." It later emerged both terror cells had been trained by the same al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.
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