The 7/7 Bombings: 'It Was Hell – Nothing Can Prepare You'

Graziadaily

18 hours ago

Twenty years ago, London suffered the biggest act of murder on English soil since the Second World War. On 7 July 2005 at around 8.50am, three bombs went off on Tube trains close to Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square stations. An hour later, a bus in Tavistock Square was torn apart by a fourth explosion. Fifty-two people were killed and more than 700 injured.
The events triggered the most extensive criminal investigation in British history, as authorities rushed to prevent more killings. 'The politicians and police were concerned that this was the first of a wave of attacks that would wreck London,' says Adam Wishart, who, with James Nally, co-authored new book Three Weeks In July and co-directed 7/7: The London Bombings , a documentary on BBC iPlayer. 'They were dealing with a huge psychic shock. It was incredibly urgent to work out what had happened, and uncover the network surrounding the perpetrators.'
Many survivors suffered life-changing injuries. Martine Wiltshire lost both her legs on the Aldgate train; she recalls seeing one of her new shoes caught in tangled metal far away from her, and struggling to understand.
'Since then she has become a sitting volleyball player, a Paralympian and a motivational speaker – it's a central element of her life,' says Wishart. 'But there are some people, I imagine, who have put the experience in a box and buried it.'
An officer on the anti-terrorism squad, Dave Skiffins was one of those who went into the shell of the Tube carriage below Russell Square and collected the remains of more than 20 bodies. 'Individual people were sometimes blown into hundreds of pieces,' he told Wishart and Nally. 'It was hell. To see such devastation. No amount of training prepares you for that – the bodies, the bits, the blood. These people were taken in the prime of their lives. That's what got us more than anything. When they left home that morning to go to work, they didn't know that it was all going to end there.' Skiffins still regularly dreams about what he saw.
At the highest level, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair was responsible for protecting the country. Talking to him, says Wishart, it was clear that he found the event emotional and frightening. 'Above all, the purpose of Government is to keep citizens safe – and in that sense he had failed.'
Blair told the authors that he remembers, the following evening, watching his five-year-old son sleep. 'I'd spent all day just trying to do the job of being Prime Minister. But you are a human being... I remember going and seeing Leo sleeping and just thinking, 'What does it all mean for him, for his generation, for the country he's going to grow up in and for the future?''
The book makes it clear that there are no easy decisions or solutions in dealing with a terror threat – but intelligence services were criticised for what they'd missed. It emerged that one bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan, had been flagged in previous investigations. 'There was a lot of chatter in the press about how MI5 could have acted sooner,' says Wishart. 'But it's a dilemma. You can stop every suicide bomber if you have a totalitarian state – but otherwise someone has to prioritise who we should follow and who we shouldn't.'
Two weeks after the bombings, the Met Police took a risk to stop a potential attack and got it horribly wrong. On 21 July 2005, four more bombs had been detonated in London but failed to explode, triggering a manhunt for those responsible. The next day, the innocent 27-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes was mistaken by police for suspect Hussain Osman, and was shot dead.
'It was a terrible tragedy following a series of awful mistakes,' says Wishart. 'The police then lied to try to cover up the incident, and that was something that did lasting damage to their reputation.'