Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
MI5 transcript of one long, fragmented conversation between Omar Khyam and Mohammad Sidique Khan, sitting with Tanweer in Khyam’s bugged car, threw interesting light on the 7/7 bomber’s concerns in February 2004. There was a lot of talk about how to get £20,000 or so by ripping off credit card issuers, about Khan’s preparations to take a ‘one-way ticket’ to fight in Afghanistan and about Khyam’s plan to start the fertiliser bombings in the next few weeks.
KHAN: ‘Are you really a terrorist?’
OMAR KHYAM: ‘They’re working with us.’
KHAN: ‘You’re serious. You are, basically?’
OMAR KHYAM: ‘I’m not a terrorist, but they’re working through us.’
KHAN: ‘Who are? There’s no one higher than you.’
Omar Khyam did not mention Bluewater or the other targets, but he made it clear his group of bombers was ready to go.
OMAR KHYAM: ‘I don’t even live in Crawley any more. I moved out, yeah, because in the next month they’re going to start raiding big time all over the UK.’
It was after this conversation, on 2 February 2004, that Khan and Tanweer were tailed back from Sussex to Yorkshire for the first time. It was always said that one of the intelligence failures that led to the 7/7 atrocities was the fact that MI5 did not contact the police about this connection. It has now been revealed that there were ten ‘clusters’ of secure emails between MI5 and West Yorkshire Police referring to Khan3. The communication happened but the chance to follow up and save more than 50 lives was missed.
Ever since 2005, there has been a great deal of misleading nonsense written about a terror simulation exercise in London, scheduled for 7 July, starting at 9.30am and run by a well-connected security company called Visor Consultants.
When Visor’s MD, Peter Power, was interviewed that day on radio and TV news, he said he had run this exercise for a firm with 1,000 staff in Central London. This was quickly misquoted as being a 1,000-person exercise, supposedly involving actors, employees and security personnel spread out across the capital. The drill was actually run for Reed Elsevier, publisher of Farmer’s Weekly, New Scientist and Variety magazine, which has a total of 1,000 staff in London. It involved just six people – the publisher’s designated crisis-management team – sitting in a room and reacting to events, including firebombs on tube trains, outlined in a set of PowerPoint slides. The exercise was ‘a table-top walkthrough’ and the scenario also envisaged a bomb outside the offices of the Jewish Chronicle.
As Power said in 2009, Deutsche Bank had run a similar session a week earlier, and the 7 July exercise even started off with fictitious news clips about a terrorist attack from an old BBC Panorama programme. You couldn’t blame Peter Power for taking the opportunity to plug his firm and its crisis-planning services, while pointing out the real need for large organisations to devise contingency plans. But, as far as the tragic events of the day were concerned, this was a red herring.
REASONS TO BELIEVE
The official UK Home Office report on the bombings, published in May 2006, seemed at first like a detailed, plausible piece of work, generally convincing despite its acknowledgement that there were still ‘uncertainties’.
So it came as a shock when people pointed out straightforward factual errors that could have been eliminated with a minute’s checking.
The report said the four bombers caught the 7.40am Thameslink train from Luton to London’s King’s Cross station, where they split up and went their separate ways. They didn’t. It seems they caught the train 15 minutes earlier, at 7.25. Which was just as well, from their point of view, as Thameslink cancelled the 7.40 on that particular day and it did not run.
If they had banked on the 7.40, they would not have been able to get on a train until 7.56. And, if they had got on the delayed train that left Luton at 7.56 on that morning, then they would not have arrived at King’s Cross until 8.42, too late (according to timings given by the Department for Transport) to board two of the three trains that were blown up.
Their 7.25 train was delayed and arrived at the King’s Cross platform at 8.23, according to Thameslink. The bombers were then seen briefly on CCTV at King’s Cross, apparently at 8.26.
Despite all the security cameras around this major London terminus, this was the last CCTV footage of the group. There were no more shots of the bombers on escalators, on the tube platforms or on the trains themselves, or of Hasib Hussain on either the number 91 or the number 30 bus.
Much of the police evidence around the 7 July bombings was infuriatingly gappy or contradictory. It was no consolation that a lot of the conspiracist theorising was even worse. One favourite item of evidence was the supposed clue in an article by ex-Mossad chief Efraim Halevy in the 7/7 edition of the Jerusalem Post, with its glaring giveaway reference to the violence in London ‘yesterday’.
This would indeed have been dynamite. But a simple check of the paper’s 2005 files shows this article was published on 8 July, not 7 July. Advance knowledge would have been deeply incriminating. Knowledge of what you’ve just seen on BBC World News and CNN is not necessarily so significant.
But there were countless inconsistencies and loose ends in the official version of events that were never resolved. And a lot of them raised crucial issues.
There were awkward questions about the relative positions of the bombers, the blast sites in the carriages and the ID materials that were found, and about the apparent ‘vaporisation’ of one of the bombers, Shehzad Tanweer.
There was not a single survivor from the second carriage at Aldgate who had seen anyone looking like Tanweer. Identification was only possible via DNA from a foot-long section of vertebrae, which wasn’t found for two days, and tiny bone and tissue remnants. Nothing else was left, so there were no fingerprints, no skull fragments and no chance to check dental records, for example.
Indeed, both the emergency doctor and the forensic medical examiner called in to check the number of victims at the Aldgate explosion identified seven bodies. The correct figure, including the bomber, Tanweer, ought to have been eight4.
The main witness evidence for Hasib Hussain’s presence on the bombed bus seemed to come from a man who claimed he was watching him fiddling in his rucksack. But the man was on the lower deck and the bomb went off upstairs.
Two victims of the Edgware Road tube blast were apparently, inexplicably, heading in the wrong direction, while at least eight victims on the number 30 bus were going to Old Street. This was not on the 30 route, though it was served by the 205, the bus in front, which can be seen in some of the photos from the scene.
On the tube, photos of blast damage that appeared to originate below the train floor raised other questions, including the suspicion, in some people’s minds, that the bombs were actually outside the carriages, possibly on the track. And, if the bombs were on the track, the four British Muslims were not the bombers.
Any idea that the bombers might have been innocents who were conned or tricked into killing and maiming so many was hard to square with Mohammad Sidique Khan’s final note to his wife, Hasina Patel, and the ‘suicide videos’ left behind by the two leaders of the group.
‘You’ve been very patient with me, even though I never told you what I was doing and often lied to you,’ Khan wrote in his farewell to Hasina. ‘Please forgive me for the deceit, lies and absence. Raise our daughter well and try to understand what I did.’
Mohammad Sidique Khan’s suicide video talked about ‘forsaking everything for what we believe in’, while Shehzad Tanweer’s appeared to speak in terms directly related to the bombing: ‘What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out