Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
fear and hatred they felt for Aung San. Even months after his death, Winston Churchill referred back to the nationalist leader’s temporary alliance with the Japanese and shocked many MPs by vilifying the man revered by so many Burmese – then and now – as ‘that traitor rebel leader of a Quisling army’.
IF THE DETAILS ARE WRONG, CAN THE STORY BE RIGHT?
The 7 July bombings in London in 2005 killed 56 people and injured more than 700, amid scenes of nightmare carnage and horror.
The four bombs were apparently detonated by four al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists – Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Jermaine Lindsay – all of them British nationals. All four men were found among the dead, making it the first time suicide bombing techniques had been used in Britain.
Three bombs exploded with devastating force in crowded late-rush-hour tube trains, at Aldgate, Edgware Road and King’s Cross, at around 8.50am, while the fourth blew up 57 minutes later on a double-decker bus in a London square.
Responsibility for the attacks was immediately claimed by the ‘Secret Organisation Group of Al-Qaida of Jihad Organisation in Europe’, though this was quickly dismissed as a crude attempt to jump on the bandwagon.
But the tangled, elusive story of 7 July 2005 led many people to question what happened and who did it, and what the thinking and motives were that led to so many deaths and injuries.
The main theories were:
1) The four British Muslims planned and carried out their own suicide bomb assault on the people of London.
2) The four bombers carried out the suicide bomb attacks under direct orders from al-Qaeda planners.
3) The bombers were following al-Qaeda instructions but had not been told they would not be returning from their bomb-planting mission.
4) The four men were set up as patsies in a plot by one or more Western intelligence services aimed at boosting support for the War on Terror – or at least allowed to go ahead with their own plot, either deliberately or through incompetence.
5) The four came to London thinking they were taking part in some sort of training exercise, arrived late, then heard about the bombs. Realising they’d been framed and were meant to die in the blasts, they fled towards Docklands and Canary Wharf, in the hope of achieving safety by taking their story to the media. They were then shot dead by anti-terrorist police at Canary Wharf, while a huge cover-up operation swung into action.
The official account2 of what happened in Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity since the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 saw the attacks as homegrown terrorism, inspired by al-Qaeda, but not planned abroad. Specific instructions from overseas masterminds were no longer suspected.
The idea that the London bombers were set up as ‘involuntary suicides’ also went out of fashion. Once it was noticed that the 7/7 bombs did not seem to have timers, this became less likely. Cynics did point out that simply telling your terrorist there was a delay mechanism, when there wasn’t one, might effectively turn a walk-away bomber into a suicide martyr. But this line of thought was greatly undermined by the two suicide videos left behind by Khan and Tanweer.
The general assumption had always been that the four men – three from West Yorkshire and one from Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire – were suicide bombers, intent on achieving jihadi martyrdom. But there were some strange hints that they might have been expecting to come back after their mission to London.
On their journey south to London’s King’s Cross, they bought return train tickets and a parking ticket at Luton station. They left more bombs and detonators in the boot of one of the parked cars. They each carried a number of items – credit cards, receipts and even a passport – that made identification possible and helped lead straight back to the bomb factory in Leeds, which was still operational.
Strangest of all were the actions of Hasib Hussain, who was trying to call the other three on his mobile phone some time after their bombs had gone off. If he knew they were all on a suicide mission, this would seem like odd behaviour.
Hussain seems to have decided that his bomb wouldn’t work and gone to buy a new battery. He called the others, presumably to see if they’d had the same problem, though, of course, they had already been dead since ten to nine. Hussain was evacuated with the general public from King’s Cross station at 8.54am, obviously in response to the emergency underground. But he tried to telephone the other three, a couple of times each, over the next 20 minutes or so.
Unable to get back into the tube, he apparently went to get a bite to eat in McDonalds, then got on a number 91 bus towards Euston, got off again and boarded the ill-fated number 30 that was finally blown up in Tavistock Square.
REASONS TO DOUBT
The two ‘alternative narratives’ of what happened on 7/7 that attracted most attention were both centred on conspiracies involving Britain’s secret services.
The more complicated and outlandish scenario had the men arriving in London with their rucksacks, thinking they were either delivering drugs or taking part in a training drill, with no thought of killing on their minds. But in this version they had been tricked, by MI5 or another agency, into behaving exactly as bombers would behave and becoming the fall guys in a ‘false flag’ terror operation, designed to justify clampdowns or attacks on Muslims at home and abroad.
When three bombs went off under the tube trains, the suspects recognised they were in mortal danger and hurried to give their story to the press to put themselves in the spotlight, so that they could not be killed off so easily. They got as far as Docklands, the spooks caught up with them and they were shot dead.
This bizarre Hollywood scenario had some convinced supporters and was the subject of several YouTube ‘exposés’. Apart from the lack of witnesses or evidence, other than second-hand hearsay and contradictory emails, this story had a lot of other objections to overcome.
Leaving aside questions about whether such an outrage could ever happen in Britain, this hypothesis had trouble accounting for Hasib Hussain on the number 30 bus, DNA evidence from the blast sites, Khan and Tanweer’s suicide videos and even, ironically, the lack of CCTV footage of the men progressing towards Canary Wharf.
For those who were happy to assume that police, doctors and ambulance crews, train passengers, forensic scientists, transport staff, office workers in buildings at Canary Wharf and everybody else were all in on one gigantic conspiracy, no scenario was impossible. Most people, however – even those with doubts about the official story – believed this was an imaginative leap too far.
In the same way, relatively few people were prepared, without some concrete proof, to believe that the four bombers had blown themselves up as part of an MI5, CIA or Mossad plot.
What was harder to disbelieve was the idea that the security services might have had some warning – or even specific foreknowledge – of the attacks and somehow failed to stop the bombers and protect the public.
Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer had come to the notice of police and security agencies several times before. But they were seen as fringe hangers-on, rather than potential terrorists.
Khan and Tanweer had both been watched, filmed and photographed by MI5 and police attached to Operation Crevice, the operation to stop planned fertiliser-bomb attacks on the Bluewater Shopping Centre and London’s Ministry of Sound nightclub. They had been observed and tailed home when they met fertiliser-bomb-plot ringleader Omar Khyam in February and March 2004. MI5 agents had twice followed Khan’s Honda back from Crawley, in West Sussex, to West Yorkshire, a distance of 230 miles. On one occasion, this was