The Mammoth Book of New Csi (38 page)

Hussain did not get on the Underground. Instead, at 8.55 a.m., he walked out of the station on to Euston Road. Mobile phone records show that he tried unsuccessfully to contact the other three bombers on his mobile over the next few minutes. He appeared relaxed and unhurried. Five minutes later, he walked back into King’s Cross station and bought a nine-volt battery from the WHSmith’s store there. Then he visited the McDonald’s on Euston Road, leaving after ten minutes.

At 9.19 a.m., Hussain was seen on Gray’s Inn Road. Around this time, a man fitting Hussain’s description was seen on the number 91 bus travelling from King’s Cross to Euston Station, looking nervous and pushing past people. At Euston, he changed to a number 30 bus, which was crowded as – due to the other bombs – the Underground was now closed. The official story then was that there had been a power surge. Forensic evidence indicates that Hussain sat on the upper deck, towards the back, with the bomb next to him in the aisle or between his feet on the floor. However, a man answering his description was seen earlier on the lower deck, fiddling repeatedly with his rucksack.

The bomb went off at 9.47 a.m., killing fourteen people, including Hussain, and injuring over 110. It remains unclear why the bomb did not go off at 8.50 along with the others. It may be that Hussain was intending to go north on the Underground from King’s Cross but was frustrated by delays on the Northern Line. Another possibility is that he was unable to detonate his device with the original battery. After he had returned to King’s Cross to buy a new one, he could not get back on the Underground because it was then closed.

After the first bombs went off at 8.50 a.m., rumours about a power surge, a crash or suspicious packages on the Underground circulated. The police and emergency services were quickly on the scene. At 10.19 p.m., Hasib Hussain’s family called the emergency Casualty Bureau and reported that he was missing. By then, the survivors and the bodies of the dead had been removed and the investigation of the crime scene had begun with a fingertip search that lasted more than two weeks.

In the tube line between King’s Cross and Russell Square, the temperature soared to 140°F (60°C) due to the oxyacetylene cutting gear they were using and because the tunnels’ ventilation system was blocked off to prevent clues being blown away. In this hot, dusty, dangerous and claustrophobic atmosphere, 100 ft (30 m) underground, CSI officers were plagued by rats and fumes from the aging tunnels which, at 11 ft (3.4 m) wide, were barely larger than the train. At first, they could work no more than twenty minutes at a time before resurfacing to gulp in fresh air and water. As conditions settled over the days, they managed two-hour shifts.

The crime scene investigation quickly bore fruit. At 11.40 p.m. on 7 July, the police exhibits officer telephoned the investigators to say that, along with many other personal items, membership cards in the name of “Sidique Khan” and “Mr S Tanweer” had been found at Aldgate. The following day, at 11.59 p.m., Khan’s credit card was found at the site of the bombing in Edgware Road. He was now tied to two crime scenes.

On 9 July, police searching for clues at the bomb sites found further items linked to Tanweer and Khan. It seems that they had been on the periphery of earlier investigations by the security services. The next day, a driving licence and other ID bearing the name of Hasib Hussain were found at Tavistock Square. Further investigation linked him to 18 Alexander Grove in Leeds.

In the early morning of 12 July, the police searched premises in the West Yorkshire area, including the homes of Khan, Tanweer and Hussain, and 18 Alexandra Grove. On 19 November the previous year, Khan and Tanweer visited Pakistan, staying there until 8 February 2005. In May, the group rented a flat in 18 Alexandra Grove from an Egyptian chemistry graduate student at Leeds University, who subsequently returned to Egypt. Lindsay had met this man at Leeds Grand Mosque in November 2004; 18 Alexandra Grove was next door. The ground-floor flat in a two-storey block was in a student area, so the bombers would not have stood out. When the police searched it on 12 July, they found much of the bomb-making equipment still in place, making it a fresh crime scene. It is not clear whether the bomb-making equipment had been left there deliberately, or whether someone was supposed to have cleared up and failed to do so. The DNA of three of the bombers – Khan, Tanweer and Hussain – was found in the bomb factory.

On 12 July, the police also received a report of four men who had been putting on rucksacks at Luton station on the 7th. They had already worked out that the three bombed Underground trains were roughly equidistant from King’s Cross when the bombs went off. They then identified four men carrying rucksacks on the CCTV footage from King’s Cross. The same four men were seen on the CCTV footage from Luton station. And Tanweer was identified from a photograph held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency.

The Nissan Micra was then found in the car park at Luton station. Four nail bombs – explosive devices of a different kind from those in the rucksacks – had been left inside, along with four containers of bomb-mixture and four detonators. These were disposed of at the scene with controlled explosions. The Micra had a parking ticket on it. The Brava did not and had been towed away. It was registered to Lindsay and, in the car pound, a 9 mm handgun was found inside it.

On 13 July, Jermaine Lindsay’s wife reported him missing and the police searched his home in Aylesbury. The following day, property belonging to Khan was found in Tavistock Square, tying him to a third crime scene. However, the police publicly confirmed only the identity of Tanweer and Hussain. The next day, property belonging to Lindsay was found at Russell Square and, on the 16th, the police confirmed the identity of Khan and Lindsay.

By 21 July, DNA profiling had identified their remains at the bomb sites and the mutilated state of their corpses indicated that they had been close to the bombs when they went off. It was assumed that they were suicide bombers as no evidence of remote-controlled detonators had been found at the bomb sites. And in the bomb factory at Alexander Grove, there was no indication that they had been trying to build remote devices. Later, in a video shown on Al Jazeera on 1 September, Khan said that he intended to martyr himself in a terrorist attack.

Khan’s video statement was broadcast together with a statement by al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri supporting the attacks. In a second video, broadcast on 19 September, Zawahiri went further, stating that al-Qaeda “launched” the attacks.

“London’s blessed raid is one of the raids which Jama’at Qa’idat al-Jihad [a faction of al-Qaeda] was honoured to launch,” he said. “In the Wills of the hero brothers, the knights of monotheism – may God have mercy on them, make paradise their final abode and accept their good deeds.”

However, while there is no firm evidence to corroborate this claim, if al-Qaeda did not directly support the attack, the 7 July bombings were certainly inspired by its ideology.

Initially, because of the force of the explosions, it was thought that plastic explosives had been used. But no residue was found at the crime scenes. Traces of high explosives were found at 18 Alexander Grove, along with chemical residues, bulbs, wires and batteries. However, containers of a mixture of black pepper and hydrogen peroxide, used as the main charge, were found in the bath, while traces of the high explosive HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamine) were found on a cooker in the kitchen.

The bombs appeared to be home-made and the ingredients used were all readily available and not particularly expensive. The first purchase of materials identified was on 31 March 2005. No great expertise was required to assemble a device of this kind and the instructions can be found on the internet, but the government’s
Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7 July 2005
says that “that the group would have had advice from someone with previous experience given the careful handling required to ensure safety during the bomb-making process and to get the manufacturing process right”. The mixtures would have smelt bad enough to make the room very difficult to work in. Tanweer and Lindsay both bought face masks from shops and the internet. The net curtains were taped to the walls so that the bombs could be made without being seen when the windows were opened. The fumes had killed the tops of plants just outside.

The mixtures would also have had a strong bleaching effect. Both Tanweer and Hussain’s families had noticed that their hair had become lighter over the weeks before the bombing. They explained this as the effect of chlorine from swimming pools as the two men regularly went swimming. Shower caps were also found at the Alexandra Grove crime scene, which may have been used during the manufacturing process to try to prevent this. The official report says that the bombers would have probably have carried out at least one test explosion.

Forensic examination of their bank accounts indicated that the group was self-financing. Even with their trips to Pakistan, bomb-making equipment, rent, car hire and UK travel, the overall cost of the 7/7 bombings was less than £8,000.

Tickets found at 18 Alexander Grove suggest that they made one reconnaissance trip in mid-March. Khan, Tanweer and Lindsay appear to have made a dry run on 28 June, travelling from Luton to King’s Cross early in the morning and getting on the Underground. They were picked up on CCTV near Baker Street tube station later in the morning and returned to Luton at lunchtime. Lindsay was found to have a chart of times taken to travel between stations.

During the investigation, the police took over 12,500 statements. There were over 26,000 exhibits of which over 5,000 were forensically examined. The police seized 142 computers along with thousands of exhibits relating to associated hardware and software, and they went through more than 6,000 hours of CCTV footage. All this led to the conclusion that Hasib Hussain, Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Jermaine Lindsay were responsible for the bombings in London on 7 July 2005.

However, there are sceptics who do not believe the official version and campaign to have the crime scene evidence released. They claim that eyewitnesses have stated that there was another explosion on a Hammersmith & City Line train travelling towards Liverpool Street. And an eyewitness interviewed by CNN on 7 July 2005 described an explosion on her Circle Line train travelling from Aldgate towards Liverpool Street – in the opposite direction from the Circle Line train mentioned in the official report.

There were conflicting stories about the acknowledged bombings. An eyewitness said they saw a hole in the carriage and “the metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train”. Another described the hole as being “twisted upwards”. There is also speculation that the explosion at Aldgate was really caused by a power surge, as originally reported, as there is no CCTV footage of Tanweer getting on the train and no eyewitnesses who said they saw him. And why was the property of Mohammed Sidique Khan found at Aldgate and Tavistock Square, when he was supposed to have died at Edgware Road?

To add fuel to conspiracy theories, it is alleged that Rudy Giuliani was staying in a hotel in Liverpool Street at the time and was notified of the bombing while everyone else was being told that there was a power surge. Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel (although he was re-elected later, in 2009), then finance minister, was also in town. It is said that he was warned to stay in his hotel and not travel to the City for a meeting before the first bomb went off. This led to the theory that the bombings were orchestrated by Mossad or the CIA.

Sceptics also point out that Jermaine Lindsay’s property was only found on the crime scene on the Piccadilly Line after his wife had reported him missing and his home had been searched. No eyewitnesses saw Lindsay on the platform or on the train. How did he manage to put a large rucksack on the floor when the carriage was full to capacity? And why was Lindsay not identified from his DVLA picture on 12 July, when Tanweer was?

Again, there is no CCTV footage of Khan getting on the train and, sceptics say, there are indications that there was more than one explosion at Edgware Road. They also suggest that there was more than one explosion in Tavistock Square, possibly a controlled explosion to get rid of a suspicious “microwave box”. One of the witnesses, a young radiation therapist named Richmal Marie Oates-Whitehead, was found dead in her Shepherd’s Bush bedsit seven weeks later in supposedly mysterious circumstances.

The July 7th Truth Campaign says that these matters cannot be cleared up until all the crime scene evidence is released.

O
N THE CHILLY
September morning of 15 September 1990, the naked body of a woman was found on the bank of the Vitava River near Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. She was lying on her back with her legs open in a sexually suggestive position, although she was covered with twigs, leaves and grass. There was a gold ring on her finger and a pair of grey stockings tied around her neck. She had been beaten and stabbed as well as strangled. There were bruises all over her body, indicating that she had put up quite a struggle. But she had not been raped. Her tampon was still in place and there was no semen on her body or at the crime scene. She had been killed recently, probably the previous night.

A search of the crime scene unearthed no clues to her identity. But further along the river, women’s clothing was found. It appeared to be the right size for the dead woman. A wallet was also found carrying the ID of Blanka Bockova.

It transpired that Ms Bockova worked at a butcher’s shop in Prague. According to acquaintances, she was a party girl, who turned the occasional trick. But she was a not a professional prostitute. The night before her body was found, she left work and went for a drink in the upmarket bars in Wenceslas Square. She met some friends. At around 11.45 p.m., they headed home. But Blanka stayed behind talking to a well-dressed stranger who appeared to be aged around forty. She was not seen alive again. Blanka Bockova died sometime between midnight when she left the bar and 7.30 a.m. when her body was found. The stranger she had been talking to was an obvious suspect, but the police had no clue who he was.