TV review: Attack on London recalls upsetting and chilling London 7/7 attacks 20 years on

Irish Examiner

a day ago

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the London 7/7 attacks, in which 52 people were killed when four bombs were detonated on public transport across the British capital.
Those terrible events now receive the Netflix treatment via a riveting and pacy four-part documentary, Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, that follows the detonations, the search for the killers, and the fatal shooting two weeks later of the entirely innocent Jean Charles de Menezes.
As is customary with Netflix, the story is told in thriller style, with each episode ending on a cliffhanger.
It starts chillingly: The first voice we hear is of one of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, from Dewsbury near Leeds in Yorkshire.
'We are at war. You will be our targets. We will fight with our blood,' he says in a recording. Twenty years later, those words have lost none of their capacity to turn your blood cold.
The biggest surprise is the incompetence of British intelligence. While MI5 tends to be seen as a sort of James Bond-type affair, always one step ahead of the bad guys, the reality revealed here is more tragicomedy.
There are upsetting interviews with survivors. We meet Daniel Biddle, who lost his legs when one of the bombs went off on a Tube train.
He recalls meeting the gaze of one of the bombers, in the last moments of his life, unwavering in his desire to kill and maim.
Biddle very nearly becomes one of those casualties. He was bleeding to death in a tunnel when two strangers came upon him and stanched the flow long enough for emergency services.
The series also confronts the impact on innocent Muslims in Britain. Mustafa Kurtuldu was on another train that was blown up. Later that week, he went on morning TV to talk about the horrors he had endured — only to be asked how he felt 'as a Muslim'.
Then-British prime minister Tony Blair appears too.
He dances around whether the Anglo-US invasion of Iraq two years previously may have motivated the bombers.
But he is clear that these were homegrown terrorists who had enjoyed all the benefits of life in the West before setting out to destroy it.
'[They] had been brought up in Britain and who had frankly enjoyed all the advantages of being British [and yet] wanted to cause deep, profound harm to our country,' he says.
His voice cracks with disbelief — as if 7/7 were a nightmare from which he, along with so many others, has never been able to awake.