7/7: Homegrown Terror review – the shock of that horrific day will never subside

The Guardian

7 hours ago

It's 20 years since 52 innocent victims and four suicide bombers died in the 7 July terror attacks on London, and, as time passes, the significance of the event has naturally faded from view: the city and geopolitics has moved on, and the day has become a memory filed under the shorthand reference '7/7'. The key to an appropriate appreciation now of what happened and why, and what those directly affected were put through, is fine detail of a kind that was unavailable in the chaos of the moment. The first two parts of Sky's documentary series 7/7: Homegrown Terror have many such revelations that bring you up short.
There is a wide selection of interviewees, but they have been judiciously chosen, especially in the case of the survivors. All are individually perspicuous, and, collectively, their stories turn horror and monstrous bad luck into multi-faceted narratives, starting with the what-ifs, the if-onlys and the ironies. Michael Henning, who was an insurance broker on his way to work and who now has a wry lyricism as he communicates his experiences, remembers a row with his girlfriend that ended with her sarcastically imploring him not to die on his way to the office: 'I like to think I followed her instructions to the letter.' Charity worker Mustafa Kurtuldu missed his tube train but was 'lucky' that another, unusually, turned up immediately. Thelma Stober was so elated by having worked on London's successful bid for the 2012 Olympics – it was announced on 6 July 2005 that the Games were coming to London – that she went into the office on her day off.
The greater irony was that the official UK terror threat level had recently been lowered: that nobody was expecting what was about to happen was true on a macro level, as well as for individuals going about their ordinary day. When the programme reaches the point where the bombs went off, those who were there give piercingly vivid descriptions of what they experienced. Henning remembers a slow-motion split-second during which he was enveloped in orange, then silver, then pitch black; Stober awoke on the train tracks, her foot twisted backwards, someone else's hand on her forehead. She talks of the guilt she felt as a Christian as she struggled to escape, when she would have liked to have been able to help others.
The sheer horror of the carnage is underlined by the anguished testimony of Inspector Steve Mingay, the police officer on duty at King's Cross station that day, who was thus the first person to reach the tube train that had blown up on its way to Russell Square. 'The floor is sticky,' he says in an urgent present tense, reliving the moment as he must have done thousands of times since that day, without the shock ever subsiding. 'There's body parts … there's body parts.' The modern documentary-maker's trick of lingering on the interviewee after they've stopped talking can feel contrived, but there is such emotional power in seeing Mingay say his piece, then reach for a water bottle which he can't sip from because his hands are shaking too much. Then he puts his head in his hands and sobs.
Alongside its stunningly stark re-creation of what happened – there are further macabre descriptions of the carnage provided by forensic investigators who were charged with sifting through the human remains and trying to work out which belonged to the bombers – Homegrown Terror also looks at the trickier question of why it happened. We see archive footage of Tony Blair and George W Bush, announcing that their response to the 11 September 2001 attack on the US was 'fighting terrorism', although their military responses were guaranteed to provoke more of it. Then we travel to Beeston, Leeds, where two of the bombers lived, to hear about a British-Asian community dogged by racism and poverty, its young men vulnerable to radicalisation. An associate of the bombers remembers how talk of jihad initially meant fighting to protect Muslims being oppressed overseas, in Chechnya or Kashmir, for example, before some of his acquaintances moved on to something much darker, aimed at revenge on their own home country.
The associate's words are spoken by an actor, as are those of a friend of 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, and recollections taken from a memoir written by Hasib Hussain's late father, expressing his disbelief at what had happened to his beloved son. Such artifices are deployed without letting the programme tip into melodrama. The bigger problem is whether we receive any comprehensive answers to the question of how the attacks happened and what else could have been done, but we are given enough background information to take a view. In trying to help us make sense of something that is so hard to fully comprehend or process, Homegrown Terror does just about all it can.
7/7: Homegrown Terror aired on Sky Documentaries and is on Now.