7/7 as it happened — by the reporter who covered it for a month

Times

8 hours ago

My train was just outside Croydon on its commuter run into London's Victoria station when it slowed to a halt. Nothing unusual in that. It was Southern rail, after all; we were used to disruption. Eventually the guard strolled through the carriages telling us there was 'some problem' with the Underground system. It was just after 9am. We were soon moving.
After a second, longer stop, he came by again to say that a power surge had knocked out the whole Tube network. I'd never heard of a complete shutdown and began to think something serious was up. What's the ultimate power surge, I thought — an explosion? My fellow passengers seemed unconcerned. Many had their heads buried in the front-page news of London's successful bid to host the 2012 Olympics, announced at lunchtime the day before. It was the story dominating early TV bulletins and I wondered if my day's assignment would be to report on security for the Games — I knew police would already be working on a plan.
I rang my news desk at Sky. My colleagues knew little more than I did, but there were reports of fires at a couple of Underground stations. At 9.24am the Metropolitan Police press office announced it was dealing with an incident at Aldgate Tube station and people were hurt. That wasn't much to go on.
There was no Twitter or Facebook back then to plunder for eyewitness accounts, few people had cameras on their mobile phones. Frustratingly, my news editor told me the main phone line to the Met press bureau was constantly engaged. He needed my help. I was the crime reporter with the personal contact numbers of key figures at New Scotland Yard, the Met's headquarters.
When I got through to one of them the background office noise suggested a sense of organised panic. It's serious, he said, there were several incidents and some casualties. Was anyone dead, I asked. Yes, but please don't broadcast that yet, he urged me. Terrorist attacks? Maybe, he said.
I left my window seat for the relative privacy of an alcove by the train door and relayed all of this to the news desk. I was put straight through to the Sky News studio and repeated, with some caution, what I knew live on air.
'The situation is very unclear but police have reacted to reports of five explosions, at least, at various Tube stations around central London — King's Cross, Edgware Road, Aldgate, Russell Square and Liverpool Street,' I said. 'And I know there have been some serious casualties. It's a major incident, anti-terrorist branch officers are involved and on the scene of some of those reported explosions, but there isn't any confirmation, at the moment, that this is a terrorist incident. Scotland Yard sources are talking about a very firm co-ordination of these explosions, which would suggest that there may be some terrorist involvement.'
A colleague, the news producer Bob Mills, also phoned in from Tavistock Square, where he had witnessed an explosion on a red double-decker bus. By the time I'd stopped talking, those passengers who'd overheard me were understandably quite alarmed. I was too.
In fact there were three Tube bombs — at Edgware Road, Aldgate and Russell Square stations — but some survivors had escaped by walking through tunnels that emerged at King's Cross and Liverpool Street, creating confusion over the exact number of incidents. With the bus, there had been a total of four explosions.
Victoria was shut, so my train was diverted to Cannon Street station. Sky's bulletins were already showing helicopter footage of bloodied walking wounded and more seriously injured survivors being stretchered out of Tube stations.
With trains and bus services suspended, and not a taxi in sight, I walked the two and a half miles to New Scotland Yard — which was then at 8-10 Broadway in Westminster — against a tide of bewildered people heading in the opposite direction through damp, drizzly streets that echoed with the constant blare of emergency vehicle sirens. I was wet, tired and worried, not for my own safety but that my rivals would be getting ahead of me on the story.
I was trying to ring contacts for updates but at 11.10am my mobile phone stopped working. The system, so overloaded with calls, had crashed. Police did consider forcing the phone networks to suspend services for fear the bombs — like those that had killed 193 people on Madrid commuter trains a year earlier — had been triggered by mobile phones used as timers. And there could be more.
Eventually, around 11.30am, I took up my position in front of a live camera outside New Scotland Yard, plugged in my earpiece and, thanks to TV's satellite technology, was able to connect with my office at least. I was there day and night for three weeks.
Broadway was a narrow, often congested street, where buses constantly got stuck in the jam and chugged diesel fumes over us.
It was a time of horror, but also of uplifting tales of bravery and survival. I was 50 and had been a crime reporter for a decade, but I had rarely covered a story so big. It was to change the nature of my role, as our audience figures shot up.
Who was behind the bombings? I would soon be asked to speculate. My thoughts went back four years to a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority I'd attended a few days after the al-Qaeda terror attacks in the US on September 11, 2001. In a blunt warning to the committee, which oversaw the Met force, the commissioner at the time, Sir John Stevens, had said: 'Make no mistake, we're next.'
Ever since hijacked passenger planes had crashed and killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, commuters in the UK had become used to posters and announcements telling them to be vigilant. Like 9/11, the London bombings of 7/7 appeared to have come without warning from a group similarly motivated by a hatred of the West. And if that was the case, they would be the first suicide bombings in Britain.
Before midday the new Met commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, against the advice of his senior press officers, toured TV news studios. It was too early for the boss to be talking publicly, his advisers warned him, because he didn't have the full picture. He overruled them. He was six months into the job and wanted to show who was in charge. In live interviews he said, erroneously, there were six explosions and conceded London had suffered 'probably a major terrorist attack'.
In our main lunchtime bulletin I had no official death toll to announce, but reported from police sources that 'forty, perhaps even more' had died and, with victims still trapped, the number was likely to rise. I spoke to an officer who had been at the bus bomb site where, he told me, at least seven people were dead. In all, I was told, up to 1,000 people had been injured and 150 of them seriously, though the final tally of nonfatal casualties was about 770.
I was told that traces of explosives had been found at two of the bomb sites and there were fears of more attacks. Officers from the Met, City of London and British Transport forces were already stretched but were also having to deal with suspicious packages and hoax calls.
During many live reports the TV screen was split, showing me on one side and, on the other, blurred and smoky mobile phone footage, sent in by a viewer, of stunned survivors escaping from damaged carriages. It showed a remarkably calm evacuation.
On big, fast-moving stories I rarely have time to pause and consider the horror of what the victims have been through. This time, as a regular Tube and bus traveller, I did imagine myself in their place. I pictured a fireball hurtling through the carriages followed by a deafening bang. The reality wasn't like that.
We ran an early interview with a survivor, Chris Randall, a 28-year-old accounts manager from Bromley. From his hospital bed he described a blinding white light but didn't remember any loud noise. Until the screams.
Later a police contact told me that one of the bodies recovered from the bus had injuries consistent with those seen on suicide bombers in Israel and Iraq. I went on air, sheltering under an umbrella in pouring rain, and raised the spectre of suicide bombers in London.
At 6.13pm police put the death toll at 37. Three hours later it rose to 38 when an injured victim died in hospital. The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said the bombs bore 'all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda'. Indeed, we were already reporting that a group thought to be linked to al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility. Another question for the coming days was whether the bombers had been sent to London from abroad or were they actually British?
Inevitably, after the initial shock and horror, the drama of the rescue operation and the harrowing survivor stories, there was a constant demand for new details of the investigation, especially from our 24-hour news channel.
A daily afternoon press briefing was established at the QEII conference centre opposite Westminster Abbey. As a member of the Crime Reporters Association, a group of accredited journalists, I got extra updates in private, at the back of the room, immediately afterwards. Those updates usually came from the assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, head of special operations and in overall charge of the investigation. He was a down-to-earth, media-friendly cop who, at 46, had just returned to the Met after three years as chief constable of Norfolk.
Those meetings sometimes got heated, as Hayman didn't want to reveal too much too soon, especially on the bombers' identities. Detectives suspected the attack had been a suicide mission but wouldn't confirm it. They were in touch with the bombers' families but were having to treat them as bereaved relatives and also potential suspects who could be part of a wider conspiracy.
Whenever a senior officer, or someone I knew, walked in or out of the police headquarters I badgered them for news. It wasn't very dignified but sometimes it paid off, especially when a forensic scientist told me the political pressure he was under to deliver results. Occasionally the experienced director of public affairs, Dick Fedorcio, 52, came out and held impromptu briefings on the pavement.
Once I was in the middle of a live report when I became aware of a noisy huddle behind me and realised I was missing an important update from Fedorcio. I asked the presenter in the studio to hang on while I turned round, got the gist of it, turned back and announced on air the latest death toll figures. If it looked a bit rough round the edges, at least our viewers were getting a sense of real breaking news.
When other non-crime journalists complained about our special CRA briefings, Fedorcio's affable deputy, the 41-year-old Chris Webb, came up with a plan. From then on, instead of the extra QEII meetings, we were invited most nights around the corner to the Sanctuary House bar in Tothill Street, where, at a discreet corner table, Webb and Hayman would give us more information.
It was a bold and unusual step but the police needed to keep trusted journalists onside. The investigators had lots of undercover inquiries going on, some details of which they told us on the understanding we did not report them at the time. They wanted to avoid us finding out about sensitive operations via other sources and compromising them by running stories.
In return we learnt more than we normally would about the progress of an investigation. Nowadays police press officers often resist our demands for updates on big stories by repeating the mantra: 'We are not going to give you a running commentary.' In the days after the bombings that's just what they did give us. It was so useful that one night I slipped out of the pub three times to deliver live updates into our evening programme. More often than not it was titbits, the numbers of officers involved or the latest regional force to join the investigation.
There was another reason for their openness. Although the bombers were dead, the hunt was on for anyone who had helped or encouraged them — living suspects who could be prosecuted. In normal circumstances police would be guarded in giving details to avoid prejudicing a future trial, even though it might be a year or two away.
But this was different. Hayman and Webb seemed to take the view that the public had a right to know as much as they could about this unprecedented threat from a new enemy within. By now police were convinced the bombers were British. Late on the first night investigators picking through the wreckage of the blasts had found, close to the bombers' rucksacks, gym membership cards for two of the terrorists, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer.
By the time the four terrorists' names were released, police had located their bomb factory in Leeds and established their route into London. Three — Khan, Tanweer and Hasib Hussain — had driven to Luton railway station, where they met the fourth, Germaine Lindsay, and taken a train to King's Cross. The media focus shifted to West Yorkshire and took some of the pressure off me and my London colleagues.
One question no one could answer for days was how many people had died. Families couldn't understand the delay in identifying all the victims. When reporters pressed the senior identification manager, Detective Superintendent Jim Dickie, during a live press conference he got a bit exasperated.
He tried to explain how and why forensic examination at the bomb sites was holding up the removal of bodies to the morgue. When Dickie, a straight-talking Londoner and experienced murder investigator, started describing scattered body parts, the difficulties of matching limbs with torsos and the activities of rats it became a bit too much. Sitting at his side, Webb scribbled a note and shoved it in front of him. It read: 'Shut the f*** up.' He did. The identification process accelerated and four days after the bombings the official and final death toll was 52, excluding the four suicide bombers.
Two weeks on from the bombings I was still reporting live from Scotland Yard on the ever-expanding police investigation. I was working long days and spent many nights at the St Ermin's Hotel opposite Scotland Yard. I reckoned that when I had news to deliver I could get to my pavement spot in under 60 seconds. A bit longer if I was asleep in bed.
I had a grab bag of overnight essentials, but they didn't last long. Within days my partner had appeared with a suitcase of clothes that got me through the duration. I had time only for a reunion coffee before she caught the train back to West Sussex and our kids, aged 12 and 10.
The lead story in our lunchtime bulletin on July 21 was a wave of arrests in Pakistan, where three of the bombers had family connections. The authorities there had been asked to search for a particular suspect, a Yorkshire-born Muslim with al-Qaeda links.
Reporting live, I said it was unclear if the Brit was among those arrested and besides, as far as I knew, Scotland Yard had not briefed reporters that the man was wanted. Detectives were interested in talking to many people whose names they had passed to various countries. The presenter asked me about a planned meeting that day between the prime minister and chiefs from MI5 and MI6 amid concerns over missed warning signs. I'd been told by a source that the spooks didn't accept the notion of 'intelligence failures'. To them there were only 'intelligence gaps'.
Twelve minutes into the bulletin news broke from the Reuters agency of smoke, panicking passengers and evacuations at three Tube stations: Warren Street, Shepherd's Bush and the Oval. A witness at Warren Street described a minor explosion that blew open the rucksack of a passenger who had fled at the next stop. He said there was shock and fear in the carriage but no injuries. Later one injury was reported.
Reports spoke of a nail bomb explosion and gunshots at Warren Street. By the time I was back on air I'd been briefed enough by police sources to say there were no gunshots. Witnesses had probably heard the sound of a detonator going off but failing to ignite a bomb. Soon after came news of a similar bombing attempt on a bus in east London. It was 7/7 all over again, but without the carnage.
Police warned of a tall, black or Asian man seen running from Warren Street station with 'a hole in his top with wires protruding from it'. Armed officers were seen entering nearby University College Hospital.
We showed footage of other gun cops holding a man outside the gates of Downing Street, where they ordered him to lay down and open his shirt to show he wasn't wearing a bomb. He was led away in handcuffs but he was not one of the bombers.
I was surprised when we started urging viewers to 'send your photos of the incidents to [e-mail]'. Surely, I thought, we should be directing such potential evidence to the police? Someone at Scotland Yard must have complained because within an hour a new message appeared: 'Send images to police via www.police.uk.'
At 2.30pm we caught the commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, on his way to a meeting of the government's Cobra emergency committee. He seemed relaxed and told reporters: 'At the moment casualties appear to be very low … the bombs appear to be smaller than on the last occasion.'
He told people to stay where they were and go about their normal business. Behind him in the street people wandered past seemingly unconcerned or unaware of what was going on.
In Downing Street the prime minister, Tony Blair, who was hosting his Australian counterpart, John Howard, said the police and security services had things under control. He didn't want to minimise the seriousness of the new attacks but said it was important people reacted calmly. He was going back to his scheduled meetings.
The commissioner made another statement shortly afterwards, saying the situation was fully under control: there had been four failed bombings that day and one non-fatal casualty. Our presenter Anna Botting concluded: 'As far as Sir Ian Blair and Tony Blair are concerned, incident over.'
Police had the failed bombers' DNA, fingerprints, CCTV images and their bombs. They hoped to establish where they had bought their rucksacks. I stressed the urgency of the manhunt but reported that detectives were confident of catching them. I was still on the Scotland Yard pavement.
I didn't know that police had already located a man they thought was one of the suspects after linking images and more gym cards from the scene to a flat in south London. When he left the building undercover armed police followed him to Stockwell Tube station.
Around midday I had a call from Peter Rose, a former Fleet Street crime reporter who was now working freelance and had better contacts than me. 'Hi Brunty,' he said quite calmly, 'they've shot dead one of the wanted bombers at Stockwell Tube.'
I hesitated to report it straight away. Could I be sure Peter was right? It would be a big thing for me to get wrong. I needed another source. My rivals along the street were chatting among themselves, so they obviously hadn't had the same tip. I started ringing contacts to corroborate the story.
A few minutes later a senior detective I knew walked past and without breaking his stride said to me in little more than a whisper: 'Have you heard? We've shot one of the suicide bombers.' He was gone before I could mutter my thanks.
I took a deep breath and reported what I knew, live on air. There wasn't much detail but it was huge news — I said I understood police had shot dead a man they believed was one of the failed bombers. I sensed other reporters stop talking and lean in to catch what I was saying. Before I'd finished speaking I could hear their phones ringing.
The next few hours were pretty chaotic. At the afternoon press conference Sir Ian Blair said the dead suspect was linked directly to the ongoing investigation. He understood the man was challenged by armed police and refused to obey. His press office told reporters the suspect had jumped the station barrier. It turned out all of that was wrong.
The next day police revealed they knew the man's identity and confirmed he was not one of the failed bombers. Later they named him as the Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes. He was 27. We didn't know all the details, but he was the tragic victim of mistaken identity and poor communications amid the heightened fear of another terror attack. So ended one of the bleakest days in Scotland Yard's history.
I had a foreign holiday booked to Florida in two days' time, but I was still outside the Yard reporting on the manhunt. I warned my family they may have to go without me.
The bomber Yassin Hassan Omar, whose device failed to ignite at Warren Street station, had been arrested two days earlier in Birmingham. It emerged later that he'd escaped London dressed in a burqa.
Around 10am a viewer in west London called to say there was a lot of police activity nearby and that residents of a block of flats were being evacuated. And yes, she let us put a camera crew into her flat overlooking the scene. Police confirmed they had an operation going on. I didn't tell them we had a great view of it.
We were soon broadcasting live pictures of the unfolding drama: roadblocks, streets lined with police, fire and ambulance vehicles and people being hurried away. When we showed firearms officers putting on full body armour and balaclavas ready for a raid, there was uproar at Scotland Yard.
Hayman, the assistant commissioner, rang me asking — no, insisting — that we stop live coverage immediately. He didn't tell me exactly what was going on, but explained that if someone in the flat they were monitoring was watching our pictures of the police tooling up, they might just detonate a bomb. We stopped our live broadcast but filmed what happened for later use.
After a two-hour stand-off, two of the failed bombers, Muktar Said Ibrahim and Ramzi Mohammed, were arrested at the flat. That night we ran footage of one being led away and audio of police shouting commands earlier for the suspects to give themselves up. They obeyed and emerged in their underpants, as instructed, with their hands raised. A few hours later the fourth failed bomber, Hussain Osman, was arrested in Rome.
It had been an extraordinary three weeks and the biggest police investigation in Britain. It was far from over, but I was finally released from my spot and joined my family for our holiday. When I returned two weeks later I covered the early court appearances of the would-be bombers.
When I interviewed Sir Ian Blair on his resignation three years later, he said he considered Jean Charles de Menezes to be the 53rd victim of the terrorists, adding: 'I'm deeply sorry about his death.' The episode had clearly blighted his time as Britain's top cop.
He endeared himself to me when a BBC documentary interviewer asked him what was the first thing he did when he was told of the 7/7 bombings. 'I did what everyone else did,' he replied, 'I turned on Sky News.' To their credit, the Beeb producers kept his words in.
In the wake of 7/7, Tony Blair declared: 'The rules of the game are changing.' His government hurried in new counterterror laws in anticipation of more attacks. MI5 embarked on a huge recruitment drive with a 50 per cent boost to its funding agreed before 7/7. More tragedies came: a car bomb at Glasgow airport, the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby, stabbings on London Bridge, the killing of pedestrians and a policeman in Westminster, the Manchester Arena blast. And I've reported on them all — usually from the pavement outside Scotland Yard.Martin Brunt has been the Sky News crime correspondent since 1994. He is the author of No One Got Cracked Over the Head for No Reason: Dispatches from a Crime Reporter (Biteback £10.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members