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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers review – finally, Netflix makes a great, serious documentary
Netflix is not always known for its restraint in the documentary genre, but with its outstanding recent film Grenfell: Uncovered, and now Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, it appears to be finding a new maturity and seriousness in the field. There have been plenty of recent documentaries on the subject of the attacks and the sprawling investigation that followed – no surprise, given that it is the 20th anniversary this week – but there is still real depth to be found here. Over four parts, this thorough series unravels the initial attacks on the London transport system, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, then follows that febrile month into the failed bombings of 21 July, and then the police shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, a day later. The first 25 minutes or so simply recount those first attacks, compiling the story using phone pictures, news footage, occasional reconstructions, the infamous photographs of the injured pouring out of tube stations and accounts from survivors and the families of victims. Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail. In those details, it is unsparing and frequently horrifying. Daniel Biddle lost his legs in the explosion at Edgware Road. His memory of locking eyes with the man who would shortly detonate the bomb in his bag is chilling, and his account of his fight to survive is as gripping as it is brutal. Others talk about the chaos, the noise, the screaming. One woman, who had managed to jump on the 30 bus near Tavistock Square in all of the transport disarray, recounts getting a text from her boyfriend at the time, saying: 'You were right, they were bombs.' She had just put her phone back in her pocket after reading it, she says, when the bus exploded. Those attacks led to the largest criminal investigation ever seen in the UK, which is the primary focus of all four episodes. These were the first suicide bombings to take place on British soil, and police did not know, immediately, that the bombers had also blown themselves up. The revelation about how they came to suspect this – from evidence gathered in one of the tube carriages – is gruesome and fascinating. Explosives expert Cliff Todd talks of material and techniques he had never seen before, and the work that went into tracking down those responsible – and attempting to prevent further attacks – is astonishing in its scale and reach. This is not simply a police procedural – and that strengthens it greatly. It is impressively comprehensive, taking in the political and media climate of the time. There are interviews with Eliza Manningham-Buller, then director general of MI5, as well as the former prime minister Tony Blair. It even puts the crucial question to Blair: did the invasion of Iraq in 2003 lead directly to these attacks in Britain? His answer is politician-like and broad, but at least it asks the question, and offers context to attacks that did not happen in a vacuum. Another survivor, Mustafa Kurtuldu, recalls his experience of being on the tube near Aldgate when his train was blown up. When he was finally removed from the carriage and taken out of the station, police searched his bag. There is footage of an appearance on GMTV, just days later, when the presenter asks him how he feels about the attacks, 'as a Muslim'. When the investigation moves to Beeston, in Leeds – where two of the four attackers were from – a youth worker in the Muslim community talks about the realisation that, as after 9/11, he would be asked, once more, to apologise for the actions of extremists. The third episode deals with the failed attacks on 21 July. There are eyewitness accounts of the explosions that went wrong – chilling and eerie, in their own way – the subsequent hunt for the four men who escaped is, again, astonishing in its scope. The next day, the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was on his way to work when he was described as behaving in an 'edgy' manner by police who had mistakenly identified him as a suspect. He was shot dead. One of the officers who pulled the trigger speaks here, his identity disguised. Again, the strength of Attack on London is in the details. When officers finally caught up with Yassin Omar – who had attempted to blow up Warren Street and had fled to Birmingham disguised in a burqa – he was standing in a bath with a backpack on. Fittingly, though, this does not end with the attackers, but with the survivors and their relatives. It strikes a careful balance throughout. Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers is on Netflix now.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers review – finally, Netflix makes a great, serious documentary
Netflix is not always known for its restraint in the documentary genre, but with its outstanding recent film Grenfell: Uncovered, and now Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, it appears to be finding a new maturity and seriousness in the field. There have been plenty of recent documentaries on the subject of the attacks and the sprawling investigation that followed – no surprise, given that it is the 20th anniversary this week – but there is still real depth to be found here. Over four parts, this thorough series unravels the initial attacks on the London transport system, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, then follows that febrile month into the failed bombings of 21 July, and then the police shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, a day later. The first 25 minutes or so simply recount those first attacks, compiling the story using phone pictures, news footage, occasional reconstructions, the infamous photographs of the injured pouring out of tube stations and accounts from survivors and the families of victims. Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail. In those details, it is unsparing and frequently horrifying. Daniel Biddle lost his legs in the explosion at Edgware Road. His memory of locking eyes with the man who would shortly detonate the bomb in his bag is chilling, and his account of his fight to survive is as gripping as it is brutal. Others talk about the chaos, the noise, the screaming. One woman, who had managed to jump on the 30 bus near Tavistock Square in all of the transport disarray, recounts getting a text from her boyfriend at the time, saying: 'You were right, they were bombs.' She had just put her phone back in her pocket after reading it, she says, when the bus exploded. Those attacks led to the largest criminal investigation ever seen in the UK, which is the primary focus of all four episodes. These were the first suicide bombings to take place on British soil, and police did not know, immediately, that the bombers had also blown themselves up. The revelation about how they came to suspect this – from evidence gathered in one of the tube carriages – is gruesome and fascinating. Explosives expert Cliff Todd talks of material and techniques he had never seen before, and the work that went into tracking down those responsible – and attempting to prevent further attacks – is astonishing in its scale and reach. This is not simply a police procedural – and that strengthens it greatly. It is impressively comprehensive, taking in the political and media climate of the time. There are interviews with Eliza Manningham-Buller, then director general of MI5, as well as the former prime minister Tony Blair. It even puts the crucial question to Blair: did the invasion of Iraq in 2003 lead directly to these attacks in Britain? His answer is politician-like and broad, but at least it asks the question, and offers context to attacks that did not happen in a vacuum. Another survivor, Mustafa Kurtuldu, recalls his experience of being on the tube near Aldgate when his train was blown up. When he was finally removed from the carriage and taken out of the station, police searched his bag. There is footage of an appearance on GMTV, just days later, when the presenter asks him how he feels about the attacks, 'as a Muslim'. When the investigation moves to Beeston, in Leeds – where two of the four attackers were from – a youth worker in the Muslim community talks about the realisation that, as after 9/11, he would be asked, once more, to apologise for the actions of extremists. The third episode deals with the failed attacks on 21 July. There are eyewitness accounts of the explosions that went wrong – chilling and eerie, in their own way – the subsequent hunt for the four men who escaped is, again, astonishing in its scope. The next day, the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was on his way to work when he was described as behaving in an 'edgy' manner by police who had mistakenly identified him as a suspect. He was shot dead. One of the officers who pulled the trigger speaks here, his identity disguised. Again, the strength of Attack on London is in the details. When officers finally caught up with Yassin Omar – who had attempted to blow up Warren Street and had fled to Birmingham disguised in a burqa – he was standing in a bath with a backpack on. Fittingly, though, this does not end with the attackers, but with the survivors and their relatives. It strikes a careful balance throughout. Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers is on Netflix now.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
7/7: Homegrown Terror review – the shock of that horrific day will never subside
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.
