The 7/7 London Underground Bombing, Not So Homegrown

A Selection from: The Evolution of the Global Terrorist

Bruce Hoffman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231538862
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An analysis of the suicide attacks against London transportation targets that killed 56 people and injured hundreds, by the author of Inside Terrorism. It was among the most important operations directed by core al Qaeda leaders in years following the events of September 11, 2001. Initially, the incident was dismissed by the authorities, pundits, and the media as the work of amateur terrorists—untrained, self-selected and self-radicalized, "bunches of guys" acting on their own with no links to any terrorist organization. Evidence presented here, however, reveals a clear link between the bombers and the highest levels of the al Qaeda senior command, then based in the lawless border area separating Afghanistan and Pakistan. Written by the author of Inside Terrorism, this chapter is part of the Columbia Studies series that examines major terrorist acts and campaigns undertaken in the decade following 9/11.

The 7 July 2005 London Bombings

Both at the time of the July 7, 2005, London bombing attacks and since then, a misconception has often been perpetuated that this was entirely an organic or homegrown phenomenon of self-radicalized, self-selected terrorists.¹ Indeed, British authorities initially believed that the attacks were the work of disaffected British Muslims: self-radicalized and self-selected, operating only within the United Kingdom and entirely on their own.² Newspaper accounts repeatedly quoted unnamed security sources using the term “clean skins” to describe the bombers: a shorthand of sorts meaning that they had no prior convictions or known terrorist involvement.³ In the Cabinet Office on the day of the bombing, a senior intelligence officer’s suggestion that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks was reportedly “laughed at” and dismissed as “absurd.”⁴ That morning, Scotland Yard’s deputy assistant commissioner, Brian Paddick, told a press conference, “As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.”⁵ And in an interview on BBC Radio 4 on the morning after the bombings, Home Secretary Charles Clarke stated that the attacks had come “out of the blue,” suggesting that the bombings were some spontaneous outburst of rage and anger manifested in an act of extreme violence that could not have been anticipated or prevented.⁶

Such arguments were widely cited in support of the then-fashionable contention that entirely homegrown threats had superseded those posed by al-Qaeda and that al-Qaeda was no longer a consequential, active terrorist force. Accordingly, many analysts and government officials concluded that the threat from al-Qaeda had in fact receded and that the main security challenge emanated completely from unaffiliated, self-selected, and self-radicalized individuals. The evidence that has come to light since the 2005 London attacks, however, points to precisely the opposite conclusion: that al-Qaeda was and is alive and kicking and that it has been actively planning, supporting, and directing terrorist attacks on a global canvas since at least 2004 and was certainly behind the 2005 London bombings.⁷ Hence, rather than an organic, entirely homegrown plot perpetrated by “clean skins” acting entirely on their own, al-Qaeda’s involvement—and that of other terrorist organizations—is crystal clear.

The Bombings

At 8:50 a.m. on Thursday morning, July 7, 2005, three bombs exploded within fifty seconds of one another on three different London Underground (subway) trains.⁸ One explosion occurred on an eastbound Circle line train traveling from Liverpool Street to Aldgate Station. The bomb had been placed on the floor of the third carriage. Seven people were killed, and at least ninety others were injured in the blast. A second bomb was on a westbound Circle line train that had just left the Edgware Road station bound for Paddington. The train was one hundred meters into the tunnel when a bomb located on the floor exploded in the second carriage. At the same moment, another train happened to be passing headed in the opposite direction.⁹ Its driver later described how the force of the explosion lifted his own train completely off the track.¹⁰ In the second explosion, eight people were killed and another 185 injured. The third device detonated in the first carriage of a westbound Piccadilly line train between Kings Cross and Russell Square stations, killing fourteen people and injuring seventy-three. Nearly an hour later, at 9:47 a.m., a fourth bomb detonated on the upper deck of one of London’s famed red double-decker buses. The blast tore the roof off the route 30 bus as it crossed the junction of Tavistock Square and Upper Woburn Place. Twenty-seven people died in the bus attack, and another 180 were injured. A total of fifty-six people perished that morning, including the four bombers. More than 500 were injured.¹¹

London’s long experience with Irish terrorism coupled with extensive planning, drills, and other exercises ensured that the city’s emergency services responded quickly and effectively in a highly coordinated manner. The initial deployment of emergency service personnel to the four blast sites entailed seventy-three ambulances and twelve response units, with many additional vehicles drawn from other sources. According to the official lessons learned report,

all five London Strategic Health Authorities played a part in the response and all London hospitals were placed on major incident alert, with 1,200 beds rapidly made available for more than 700 casualties arriving at accident and emergency departments over a period of several hours. The vast majority (more than 80%) were fit for discharge on the same day. Of the 103 casualties admitted to hospital, including 21 critically injured, three were to die of their injuries.¹²

In the two hours following the explosions, some 200,000 people were evacuated from more than 500 trains as the entire London Underground was shut down while a network-wide security inspection was conducted.¹³

The nearly simultaneous blasts, their horrific casualty toll, and the prospect that this was the opening salvo in a sustained terrorist campaign stunned the United Kingdom. Indeed, only weeks earlier, on June 2, the Joint Terrorism Assessment Center (JTAC), Britain’s principal governmental counterterrorism coordinating body, had concluded that “at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack in the UK” and consequently downgraded the overall countrywide terrorism threat level.¹⁴ That the four bombers had deliberately killed themselves to ensure both the attack’s success and its lethal outcome further exacerbated the fear and alarm pervading the country.¹⁵ On this score as well, the authorities had been shown grievously complacent. A report issued in March 2005 by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), Britain’s most senior intelligence assessment and evaluation body, had determined that suicide “attacks would not become the norm within Europe.”¹⁶ This judgment, coupled with the testimony of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, then director-general of the Security Service (MI5), prompted the parliamentary committee investigating the 2005 London bombings to conclude, “The fact that there were suicide attacks in the UK on 7 July [2005] was clearly unexpected: the Director General of the Security Service said it was a surprise that the first big attack in the UK for ten years was a suicide attack.”¹⁷

The Bombers

From personal documents found at the attack sites, British authorities quickly established the bombers’ identities.¹⁸ They were Mohammed Siddique Khan, age thirty, who was responsible for the Edgware Road blast; Shezad Tanweer, age twenty-two, who blew himself up at Aldgate; Jermaine Lindsay, age nineteen, who perpetrated the Russell Square explosion; and, Hasib Hussain, age eighteen, whose bomb detonated on the number 30 bus. The four men were all British citizens and, with the exception of Lindsay, had been born in the U.K.¹⁹ Although British authorities were aware of the potential that British nationals might commit terrorist acts within the U.K., the attacks nonetheless took the government and the public by surprise.²⁰ “We were working off a script which actually has been completely discounted from what we know as reality,” Andy Hayman, then the assistant commissioner for specialist operations at Scotland Yard, told the parliamentary committee investigating the bombings.²¹ Indeed, on the morning of July 6, 2005, at a private security briefing for senior Labour Party members of parliament, Manningham-Buller had assured them that there was no identifiably imminent terrorist threat either to London or, for that matter, anywhere in the U.K.²² However, just weeks earlier, a senior-level U.S. government delegation led by the U.S. National Security Council’s top counterterrorism official had reportedly arr...