Twenty years ago, London was a city under attack, living on its nerves. Out of the blue that summer of 2005, the capital’s transport system was hit by a murderous wave of al-Qaeda bombers, with devastating results. Ordinary folk going about their everyday lives died in the onslaught. Hundreds were mutilated.
London knew all about terrorist bombs from years of enduring attacks by various Irish factions. But here was something new to these shores and infinitely more terrifying – the suicide bomber hell-bent on martyrdom. To Commissioner of Police Sir Ian Blair it was a door opening into a new kind of terrorism. ‘The IRA and the Loyalists never did anything the size of this. This was a step change.’
Construction manager Danny Biddle, on his way to work from his home in Essex, actually looked one of the four bombers in the eye. It was 8.50 in the morning on Thursday, July 7, and he was in the second carriage of a Circle Line train pulling out of Edgware Road towards Paddington. ‘I had an unsettling feeling I was being stared at by a guy no more than 18 inches away. So I stared back at him.
‘I was about to say, “What’s your problem, mate?” when he reached into the bag, fiddled with something, and there was a big white flash and an immense amount of heat that hit me, and a noise I can’t begin to describe.
‘The next thing, I’m lying on the train tracks in the crawl space between the tunnel wall and the train. My hands and arms were on fire.’ He felt something digging into his lower back and reached round and pulled it out. ‘It was a bloodied foot.
‘It was pure horror. My left leg had been blown clean off. My right leg had also been severed at the knee. I screamed for help. All around me was just an unbelievable level of screaming, fear, panic and pain. You’re listening to people screaming and then you don’t hear a certain voice again because that person has died.’
Almost simultaneously, a bomb had detonated in carriage two of an eastbound Circle Line train travelling from Liverpool Street to Aldgate station. The stricken train stopped some 200 yards short of the Aldgate platform.
Just minutes later, an explosion ripped through the front carriage of a Piccadilly Line train between King’s Cross and Russell Square. The train was in a tunnel about 25 yards below ground and 760 yards from Russell Square station.
Jean Charles de Menezes, a 29-year-old Brazilian electrician, was gunned down at Stockwell Tube station in South London on July 22 2005, after being wrongly identified as a terrorist suspect
Hussein Osman, also known as Hamdi Isaac, was one of the men responsible for planting bombs on London’s transport networks
There were reports of smoke billowing out from tunnels and passengers, many badly hurt, fleeing to safety along the tracks.
Nor did the slaughter stop there. Less than an hour later, the roof was ripped off a red number 30 double-decker bus and the sides blown off, scattering bodies in the street. A witness remembered the smell of burning flesh and seeing a body lying on top of a car. A torso on the pavement had no arms, no legs, no head.
Scenes like this were being enacted all over the capital. On the Tube heading towards Aldgate and her office in the City was Martine Wright. ‘We went into the tunnel, and it must have been no more than 15 seconds later when this huge white light was in front of my eyes. When the smoke cleared, we weren’t sitting on chairs any more. The seats were gone. We were in this black metal crater with sparks flying everywhere.
‘I looked up and saw my new trainer up there in the twisted metal. Except, it wasn’t pristine white any more. It was red.’
Another commuter, Thelma Stober, found herself on the train track, partly under the train, partly out. ‘There was a leg hanging over the window and people crying, people screaming. I could see bodies. I could see the dark tunnel on both sides.’
The death toll that day was 52, with close to 800 injured. The four bombers – Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Germaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain – also died. They were all ‘clean skins’, radicalised Islamists who had somehow slipped through surveillance by the secret services, despite visits to tribal areas in Pakistan to be instructed by al-Qaeda leaders.
London was, not surprisingly, in a state approaching sheer panic. Just the day before, there had been jubilation as the city won the hotly contested bid process to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, pipping Paris at the post. Now it was virtually under siege.
The police were told the suspects were deadly and determined
To Prime Minister Tony Blair fell the decision whether to shut down the transport system as a precaution; to, in essence, lock down London. He declined, arguing that, as he would later explain, ‘if every time you get a threat you shut the infrastructure down you’re stopping normal life. I decided to let the Underground run.’
But he understandably feared further attacks, and he was right. Just over a fortnight later, there was a copycat attack on three Underground trains and a bus. It narrowly failed. The bombs all fizzled out, causing little damage. The perpetrators fled.
But, to the alarm of the authorities, this left a group of would-be suicide bombers running amok on the streets of London, the capital’s millions of inhabitants at their mercy. As police and security services scrambled desperately to track down these individuals who’d been intent on killing themselves and as many innocent people as possible, the usually stoic capital lurched into a state of panic. Newspaper headlines reflected London’s mood. ‘City of Fear’ splashed The Independent.
The febrile scene was set for a further disaster, one that would cause lasting damage to the reputation of the police. They acted in haste and an innocent man died.
The police investigation focused on tracking the movements of the suspects on CCTV. On tapes retrieved from cameras in streets around the Tube stations and along the bus route, a viewing team at Scotland Yard had no trouble spotting the three failed bombers who’d fled from Warren Street, Oval and Shepherd’s Bush stations, in each case leaving behind a rucksack oozing an ominous yellow, porridge-like substance.
There was a promising image, too, from the bus, a number 26, which had been at the junction of Hackney Road and Shoreditch High Street in east London when there was a small bang. The suspected would-be bomber helpfully sported a white baseball cap.
The CCTV teams were not only able to isolate strong facial images of the suspects but also identify that they had joined the Tube system that afternoon at Stockwell Tube station in south London. After the explosions, the Oval bomber had fled towards Brixton, the Warren Street bomber was seen heading towards Camden, and the bus bomber was photographed walking in the direction of Shoreditch High Street.
But then they simply disappeared. Where were these suspects now? And were they about to repeat the bombing operation, but more successfully this time, with mass casualties?
Apart from the CCTV images of the four suspects, the police now had one other lead. Documents found beside the rucksack at Shepherd’s Bush included a photo membership card to a gym in Wandsworth. The name on the card was Hussain Osman. It tallied with the CCTV.
While the gym ID card provided a name and a face, it did not give Osman’s address. A resourceful detective tracked down the gym’s manager at home. It was 3am but he agreed to go directly to the gym and dig out Osman’s membership application. He came back with two addresses – one in Tulse Hill for Osman and another in Maida Vale for someone called Abdi Samad Omar. They apparently shared a joint membership.
The police investigation focused on tracking the movements of the suspects on CCTV
The first officers – including team leader ‘Ralph’ – charged in, reaching the ticket barriers a minute-and-a-half after the suspect
The most experienced surveillance officer in the vicinity was ‘Ivor’, who, in a strange twist, was wearing a blue denim jacket, jeans and light blue trainers, just like the suspect
Covert surveillance teams were dispatched to each address. At the Tulse Hill address, 21 Scotia Road, the ten-strong ‘Red’ surveillance team included an SAS man known only as ‘Frank’, who was in a blacked-out van video-recording everyone emerging from the house.
But there was a problem. The house wasn’t a single address but a three-storey communal block of nine flats known as Scotia House, with a large number of people coming in and out of the main door. Tracking them all would not be easy.
Their job was to keep watch but not to attempt to arrest the suspected suicide bomber. A specialist firearms unit was on standby a few miles away from Scotia Road, being briefed for what had been codenamed Operation Theseus, waiting to be called into action. They were shown Oman’s grainy gym-card image.
Their leader, Andy Halliday, recalls being told these suspects were ‘deadly and determined’ and ‘up for it’.
The man is off the bus. They think it is him and he is very jumpy
‘I was feeling really tense. At some point there was going to be a confrontation. We might have to face suicide killers who would take us and everybody else with them if they could.’
But they were prepared for the worst, authorised to use ‘unusual tactics’, namely specialist hollow-point ammunition, which flattens on impact rather than passing through the body, causing instant incapacitation. This was essential when confronting a suicide bomber who might have explosives secreted about their body which could be detonated by the touch of a button or by pressing two wires together.
Halliday understood that they were to follow a new procedure known as Operation Kratos. Named after the Greek demigod of strength and power, it had been adopted as a response to the deadly challenges presented by suicide bombers who wanted to take with them as many people around them as possible. It was essentially a shoot-to-kill policy.
The roof was ripped off a red number 30 double-decker bus and the sides were blown off. A witness remembered the smell of burning flesh and seeing a body lying on top of a car
Previously, the decision to shoot had been the firearms officer’s alone, on the grounds that only the officer holding the gun and facing the threat could truly determine that squeezing the trigger was necessary. That officer would then be answerable in court, where they might have to justify their actions. The condition was that the officer would first have to shout a warning before firing.
But things were to be fundamentally different under Kratos. The decision to fire was now to be taken by a ‘Designated Senior Officer’ (DSO), one of a number of specially trained officers at Scotland Yard. The reasoning behind this was that the firearms officers on the ground might not be privy to all available intelligence about the suspect. Sitting in the control room, with access to all sources, the DSO would be seeing the full picture and so be better qualified to make the decision to use lethal force.
This decision would be relayed to the firearms officers’ headsets by radio. They were not to give a warning – that would give the suicide bomber time to detonate. Instead, they were to get close enough to shoot the suspect in the back of the head and immediately neutralise them. A firearms officer remembers: ‘Suddenly we’re going to effectively shoot to kill.’ He was comfortable with this, ‘provided the identification is right. That’s really crucial’.
Passengers were fleeing, shouting: They have blown his head off
Kratos had been signed off operationally and legally back in January 2003, but the details were not shared with the media or the general public. They were now about to emerge in the most spectacular fashion. As Halliday recalled: ‘We could possibly be called by the DSO to deliver a critical shot. I would be lying to say that there was no tension or fear.’
He and his team had, by now, moved closer to Scotia House, to a Territorial Army centre just 300 yards away. Suddenly their radios crackled into life.
The surveillance team reported that a young man was leaving through the communal front door. He was white, 5ft 8in, dark hair, beard/stubble, blue denim jeans, blue denim jacket, light-blue trainers and no bag. Frank, the SAS man, deemed he was ‘worth a second look’.
A second surveillance officer followed the subject to a nearby main road and described him as ‘light-skinned, North African’. A third reported him behaving ‘in a wary manner’ as he walked to a nearby bus stop and boarded a bus heading towards Brixton.
None of the officers followed him. The golden rule of surveillance decrees that the loss of a suspect is always better than disclosing an officer’s presence. But the police now had a problem. What if the subject was a suicide bomber on his way to commit an atrocity? They needed to get somebody onto that bus.
The most experienced surveillance officer in the vicinity was ‘Ivor’, who, in a strange twist, was wearing a blue denim jacket, jeans and light blue trainers, just like the suspect.
He drove off in pursuit of the bus, caught and overtook it, parked up on a side road and sprinted back to a bus stop just as the bus pulled up.
He boarded and immediately clocked the subject, who’d taken a seat at the rear of the bus facing forward. ‘Ivor’ chose a seat midway down, facing the same direction. On his phone, he whispered to a colleague who rang him for an update that he couldn’t positively identify the subject as ‘Nettle Tip’ (Hussain Osman).
The bus stopped across the road from Brixton Tube station, and the suspect stood up to get off. As he walked past, ‘Ivor’ got another look but still couldn’t positively identify him as ‘Nettle Tip’.
The man left the bus and, talking on a mobile phone, started to cross the road towards the Tube station. Another surveillance officer in a car tailing the bus secured a decent view of his face and reported that the subject was a ‘good likeness’ for ‘Nettle Tip’.
But then the suspect stopped, turned around, walked back towards the bus and got back on – all of which was reported over the radios to the Scotland Yard control room and the firearms, arrest and surveillance teams.
To many listening, his behaviour was interpreted as a classic counter-surveillance manoeuvre to lose a tail. Which is what he’d managed to do. The bus resumed its journey with the man on board, but no surveillance officers. A check of bus routes revealed that, over a mile away, the bus would stop at Stockwell Tube station.
By 09.57 – 24 minutes after he’d walked out of the front door of Scotia House – the suspect was travelling on the bus towards Stockwell Tube station. Directly behind, ‘Ivor’ and colleagues followed in a snake of surveillance vehicles. A mile or so back, the unmarked six-vehicle firearms team convoy battled through heavy traffic, at one stage driving on the wrong side of Clapham Road to make progress.
At 10.03, another surveillance officer, codename ‘Adrian’, reported the subject getting off the bus and walking towards Stockwell Tube station. He and ‘Ivor’ had anticipated the subject’s arrival and were now waiting in the station foyer. They saw him pick up a free Metro newspaper and use an Oyster card to let himself through the ticket barriers.
They set off in pursuit, stepping on to the escalator a dozen or so steps behind him. Neither had positively identified the suspect as Osman. They couldn’t be certain, either way.
But back in the control room at Scotland Yard, Commander Cressida Dick, the Designated Senior Officer for the intercept operation (who would later become Met Commissioner), was being told: ‘It’s him, the man is off the bus. They think it is him and he is very jumpy.’
Halfway down the escalator, the suspect broke into a jog. Both ‘Ivor’ and ‘Adrian’ say they transmitted on their radios that the
suspect was running down towards the platforms, where a northbound Northern Line train was just rumbling in.
It stopped, the doors opened and he jumped aboard, turned right and walked up to the next set of carriage doors. Passing these, he sat at the end of the row of seats up against the Perspex sheet, facing out towards the platform.
The bomb factory created at the property rented by the four bombers in West Yorkshire
CCTV footage showing the suicide bombers entering London’s Underground on July 7th 2005
‘Ivor’ and ‘Adrian’ followed, sitting down a few seats away from him. It struck them that they were about to go on an Underground train ride with a potential suicide bomber. Inside their heads, terror and adrenaline slowed time and amplified every tiny sound, tunnelling their vision so that the carriage appeared narrower, hotter, sweatier.
But the train did not move. Strangely, the automatic carriage doors remained open, refusing for some reason to close. Up at ground level, Andy Halliday powered the car carrying the firearms team across the entrance to the Tube station and squealed to a stop.
The first officers – including team leader ‘Ralph’ – charged in, reaching the ticket barriers a minute-and-a-half after the suspect. The officer up front – codename ‘Charlie 12’ – had been a cop for 22 years and a firearms officer for nine. In all that time he’d never fired a weapon during a live operation.
‘Charlie 12’ vaulted the ticket barrier and ran down the escalator, reassured by the scuffling feet and bellows of colleagues in his wake. On platform two, the train doors were still open as the firearms officers burst onto the platform, their weapons poised.
Sitting in the carriage, ‘Adrian’ remembers being ‘in complete shock at what I was seeing. The operation went from covert to overt very quickly. I’m thinking, what do they know that we don’t?’
‘Ivor’ acted, walking over to the doors and planting a foot down to prevent them closing, ensuring that the train couldn’t leave the platform.
The armed officers started peering inside the carriages and shouting for people to ‘get down’. The shouting triggered unalloyed terror on the train. Passengers scrambled towards the exits, abandoning belongings in their desperation to get away.
The firearms officers made eye contact with ‘Adrian’, who directed them towards the set of double doors where the suspect was. Standing there too was ‘Ivor’, frantically pointing to the subject and saying: ‘It’s him, it’s him.’
There was a moment of confusion because ‘Ivor’ was wearing the same clothes as the man they were hunting.
Thinking ‘Ivor’ was him, they came into the aim position with their firearms and were just about to pull the trigger when one of the officers noticed that ‘Ivor’ had his foot against the door to stop it shutting and realised he couldn’t be the suspect.
The armed officers began scanning the carriage again. According to ‘Adrian’, at this point the suspect leapt up from his seat as if in panic, desperate to get out of there. ‘It was a very strange thing to do, to leap up and run towards the danger rather than away from it.’
Determined he wasn’t going to get away, ‘Ivor’ grabbed him in a bear hug, forcing him back into the seat and trying to restrain his arm movements so, if he had a detonator, he wouldn’t be able to use it. The two of them were rolling around, ‘Ivor’ and the suspect, very similar in physique and clothing, entwined in an embrace.
‘Charlie 12’ went into action, putting his gun against the subject’s temple and firing. At the same time, his colleague ‘Charlie 2’ reached over ‘Ivor’, and, pushing him out of the way, pressed his Glock pistol to the subject’s head. Between them they fired nine shots at close range. Seven entered his head, one his shoulder, while another misfired.
Running down the escalator, Halliday heard gunshots ‘and I’m hoping they’re police gunshots. It was absolute pandemonium. People running for their lives’. Inside the carriage, body debris was spread over the floor and seats, and over the officers and witnesses.
Two commuters were just sitting there in total shock, having witnessed the whole incident. Other passengers were fleeing shouting hysterically: ‘They have blown his head off.’
But the anti-terrorist police were close to jubilant. One who had been listening in to the relays from Stockwell recalled: ‘There was a sense of satisfaction, certainly among those of us that’d had to deal with the devastation and deaths caused by those first suicide bombers. There may even have been a high five or two. This person has got what was coming to them.’
But this was not the case. In reality, the Met had made a terrible blunder. They had just killed an innocent man.
