Four bombs in under an hour
On the morning of 7 July 2005, four bombers detonated explosive devices in a coordinated attack across London’s public transport network between 8:49 and 9:47. Three of the bombs went off within a minute of each other aboard Underground trains: one on the Circle line between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, one on the Circle line near Edgware Road, and one on the Piccadilly line between King’s Cross and Russell Square. The fourth device detonated on a number 30 double-decker bus at Tavistock Square nearly an hour later, a delay attributed to the bomber’s inability to carry out his attack on the Underground as originally planned, forcing him to use the bus instead once the transport network had already been disrupted by the earlier explosions.
Fifty-two dead, eighteen nationalities
The attacks killed 52 civilians, in addition to the four bombers themselves, and injured nearly 800 people, with around a hundred requiring overnight hospitalisation. The civilian victims came from eighteen different nationalities, with thirty-two of the fifty-two being British and the remainder drawn from countries including Afghanistan, France, Ghana, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Vietnam among others, ranging in age from twenty to sixty with an average age of thirty-four. This combination of scale and international breadth made the attack Britain’s deadliest single terrorist incident since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and it drew global attention precisely because London’s transport network carried such an internationally diverse daily population.
Three Britons and a convert from Jamaica
The four bombers themselves came from varied backgrounds united mainly by their shared radicalisation. Mohammad Sidique Khan, aged thirty and the group’s ringleader, worked as a primary school learning mentor and lived in Beeston, Leeds, with his wife and young child. Shehzad Tanweer, twenty-two, also from Beeston, occasionally worked in his family’s fish and chip shop. Hasib Hussain, eighteen, lived with his brother in Leeds. Three of the four were British-born sons of Pakistani immigrant families. The fourth, Germaine Lindsay, nineteen, was born in Jamaica, had converted to Islam, and lived in Aylesbury with his pregnant wife and young son, a background that distinguished him from the other three bombers’ shared regional and family ties around Leeds.
A watched man who wasn’t watched closely enough
Investigators later established that Khan had briefly come to the attention of Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, during a separate investigation in 2004, but he was assessed at that time as not posing a sufficient threat to warrant continued surveillance. An independent inquest held between 2010 and 2011, led by Lady Justice Hallett, concluded that the 52 victims had been unlawfully killed, but found that their deaths could not have been prevented and that they would likely have died regardless of how quickly emergency services had reached them. The inquest also found that while MI5 had not made every conceivable improvement to its procedures, it would not be fair to conclude that greater attention should specifically have been paid to Khan before the attack based on what was known about him at the time.
A copycat attack that misfired
Two weeks later, on 21 July 2005, a second group of four attackers attempted a strikingly similar coordinated attack, targeting three London Underground stations, Shepherd’s Bush, Warren Street, and Oval, along with a London bus in Haggerston, between 12:26 and 1:30 in the afternoon. The devices used a mixture of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour intended to produce a TATP-style detonation, and three of the four bombs were reported to be of similar size and weight to those used on 7 July, with the fourth housed in a smaller container. Crucially, the explosive mixture failed to fully detonate on any of the devices, with only the detonators themselves firing, and just one minor injury, an asthma attack, resulted from the entire attempted attack.
A manhunt that killed an innocent man
The manhunt that followed the failed 21 July attack proved both extensive and, in one critical instance, fatally mistaken. CCTV images of the four suspects were released on 22 July, and police identified Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar within days, but that same day officers fatally shot Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian electrician, at Stockwell Underground station after mistaking him for one of the fleeing suspects. All four principal bombers were arrested by 29 July, with one, Hussain Osman, apprehended as far away as Rome. Six defendants faced trial in 2007, and the four main conspirators, Ibrahim, Omar, Ramzi Mohammed, and Osman, were convicted of conspiracy to murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with minimum terms of forty years each.
