7/7 TEN YEARS ON

THE LONDON TUBE BOMBINGS. Our own terrorist outrage, not 3000 murdered like the Twin Towers but fifty-seven killed and hundreds maimed and scarred for the remainder of their lives. It was called 7/7. It made a tremendous impression on me because I worked in London all the time then [2005]; knew Russell Square tube station very well; could vividly imagine what an explosion would mean in that tight tunnel.  I had to take a deep breath six months later when I took the tube out of Kings Cross; the first station you come to is Russell Square.

Millions of conspiracy theories still surround this. The only credit card the authorities found in the wreckage was one belonging to the bomber. Who did the bus bomber phone before he boarded the bus? Every one of the survivors on the Edgware Road Tube said the bomber was sitting there but the explosion occurred at the other end of the carriage [and pushed the floor up]. On and on, and the trial was pretty much a cover-up. 

If you go to 7/7 Inquest blog here you can get a lot more information but amongst the still-unanswered questions, even ten years later are:

·  There exist no recorded sightings of three of the men, Khan, Tanweer and Lindsay, after the footage from King's Cross Thameslink, some way from the Underground tube network. Apparently, a temporary CCTV system was installed at King's Cross underground and malfunctioned for the twenty crucial minutes between 8.30am and 8.50am Additionally, there is no CCTV footage showing the three from any other cameras. This means that there is absolutely no CCTV evidence placing three of the accused anywhere on the London Underground network on the morning of 7 July 2005.

·  No CCTV from pre-incidence tube carriages has been released, despite this CCTV apparently existing, and despite it being crucial evidence which could confirm or deny that three of the men boarded the carriages they are alleged to have boarded.  Why has it not been released? This CCTV should also have been made available to the trial inquest when expensive modelling of likely injuries sustained by the deceased was conducted to make up for the fact that no internal post mortems of the victims were conducted; the lack of post mortems itself being a jarring anomaly.

·  No CCTV exists from McDonald's showing whether Hussain actually used the premises to insert a new 9v battery into his apparently malfunctioning bomb.  It was revealed during the inquests that the store manager can be seen on CCTV footage actually turning off the CCTV system before Hussain entered.

·  No CCTV exists of Hasib Hussain on either of the two buses he is alleged to have boarded. There is no footage of Hussain aboard the number 91 bus, nor the number 30 bus he is alleged to have destroyed, nor is there any street or traffic camera footage showing him boarding either of the buses.

·  There is a huge discrepancy between the explosives allegedly used, as given in sworn evidence to the Jean Charles de Menezes Inquest, and the evidence that Clifford Todd gave to the 7/7 Inquests.  Clearly, not everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet about a significant aspect of 7/7.

·  There is strong evidence in the public domain to suggest that at the heart of the story behind 7/7 lay at least three operatives for both British and American Intelligence, one of whom  served an insanely short period of time in a US prison, before being quietly released, for crimes far greater than the crimes of those his testimonies put behind bars for far longer sentences.

No-one wants conspiracy theories but the authorities were happy to expunge twenty seven pages of testimony about the assassination of JFK [still redacted] until the Zapruder Film appeared; who knows if the Israelis were really behind nine-eleven: they certainly had a lot to gain. I’ve always thought the London tube bombing’s inquest verdicts were not entirely safe. That isn’t to say I am entirely against the commemoration events of today. The opposite in fact, like the Iraqi casualties we have to close the wound and the way we do that in the UK is with ceremony and singing in St Pauls.