At 4.53am on the morning of Thursday 7 July 2005, Shehzad Tanweer pulled his rented Nissan Micra into Woodall services on the M1, 50 miles south of Leeds, got out, refuelled the car and went inside, picking up three Ginsters cheese and onion pasties, crisps and a lemon-flavoured mineral water, paying and walking back to the car. But he then abruptly stopped and returned to the till — to quibble about why he had not been given the 50p meal-deal discount that should have been applied.
Just under four hours later, Tanweer would blow himself to pieces with a homemade suicide bomb concealed in a rucksack on a Circle Line train at Aldgate.
His two companions in the Micra, who had both presumably enjoyed the last supper of a Ginsters pasty too, would also die by suicide bomb, on a train at Edgware Road and on the upper deck of a number 30 London bus in Tavistock Square, respectively.
The fourth 7/7 bomber, Germaine Lindsay, a Muslim convert of Jamaican heritage, unlike his trio of Yorkshire Pakistani co-conspirators, made his own way separately to their Luton station rendezvous and had his own version of Tanweer’s closeness with cash in the face of death: he didn’t waste a few pounds paying for parking as he knew he wouldn’t be going back to it. He blew himself up on a Piccadilly Line train at Russell Square. Detectives later found his Fiat Brava had been quickly towed to a council car pound over that non-payment.
The strange episodes of the discounted pasties and the unpaid-parking is recounted in Three Weeks in July by Adam Wishart and James Nally, a forensic examination of the twin terror attacks on London 20 years ago: those that worked, killing 52 people on July 7th, and those that didn’t, on 21 July, when four more devices failed to detonate in all but identical circumstances.
Those two attacks were a fortnight apart almost to the minute but the Three Weeks title comes from the time it took to catch all the surviving bombers too, including the pair memorably seized at gunpoint in their pants.
I must declare a small interest here: I once worked with Nally, at a London press agency in the mid-nineties, and was quite friendly with a man I recall being convivial and smart. But I haven’t seen him since and am under no obligation. Nevertheless I feel it must be said ahead of declaring that this is a very good book indeed, a gripping, vivid and compelling reconstruction of an extraordinary few weeks that contains an astonishing degree of detail.
And it’s the aggregation of detail that gets you. There are the brand new Adidas trainers — her old ones were worn out dancing to Basement Jaxx in Hyde Park the week before — which Martine Wright was wearing as she travelled from Moorgate to Edgware Road before her train exploded. She then sees her new trainer as the smoke clears, leaving her wondering: “If my trainer is up there, where is my foot?” There’s off duty police officer Liz Kenworthy who is the first to arrive to help those on that carriage, who takes off her new M&S corduroy jacket and uses it to tie round the severed legs of a passenger to stop him bleeding to death. Or the mobile phones that all start beeping and ringing with hundreds of worried messages as they come back above ground into a signal after being recovered from the carnage at Russell Square.
This account traces the origins of British jihadist terrorism to a febrile pre-2005 scene of narcissistic young men — first generation Pakistani Britons, Jamaican heritage converts, disaffected recent refugees from East Africa — radicalised by “preachers of hate” like Abu Hamza, to use the period tabloid demonology.
Hamza and his ilk framed the post 9/11 US and UK invasion of first Afghanistan and then Iraq as “an attack on Islam” and called on righteous young Muslims to “defend it”. But when volunteers heeded this call they were persuaded instead to become suicide bombers in their own country: why die anonymously fighting British soldiers in the foreign fields of Helmand in Afghanistan when you could create a deadly spectacle in London?
The leader of the 7/7 attacks was Mohammed Sidique Khan, known as “Sid”, whose violent radicalisation long pre-dated 9/11. Tony Blair would always insist that those foreign wars didn’t cause noughties domestic terrorism and Khan’s history does rather suggest that he’s right.
Khan’s particular inspiration was “Sheik Faisal”, born Trevor Forrest, son of a pair of Salvation Army volunteers, who converted to Islam in his native Jamaica before coming to the UK where for years he was able to preach homicidal rants about “cockroaches” — by which he meant Jews, HIndus and Christians. Khan had all his tapes.
It would be 2003 before Faisal was finally prosecuted — by which time it was too late: Khan was in his thrall. And he was soon grooming his own followers in turn: Khan was 30 when he died but two of his gang were still in their teens.
Like the Riz Ahmed character in the jihadi satire Four Lions trying to explain his intended murder/suicide to his young son using analogies from The Lion King, Khan shot a pre-attack video of his thoughts for his six month old baby daughter to watch later: “Sweetheart … I’m going to really, really miss you a lot. I just so much wanted to be with you but I have to do this thing for our future and it will be for the best, inshallah, in the long run.”
I wonder how that girl feels about her murderous father now as she approaches her 21st birthday?
Then there’s the second wave of bombs which didn’t go off only because, as a scrap of paper found in their flat later showed, bomb maker Muktar Ibrahim, who had failed GCSE maths, miscalculated the ratio of ingredients.
The vast cast of characters includes both jobsworths/incompetents and some saints and real heroes; at one point a frustrated police officer theatrically puts his foot on the live rail to demonstrate that it is safe for rescue workers to be allowed into a bomb site where victims are dying alone unaided.
And it was all so close to home. My wife was on a Piccadilly Line train that July morning two ahead of the one that blew up. The 21/7 bomb-making factory in New Southgate is just half a mile from my house. I was news editing The Sun during 21/7 and its aftermath and recall running into the editor’s office with the “Gotcha” news that the police had “taken out one of the bastards” — only for that bastard to turn out, of course, to have been entirely innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes.
The Wishart/Nally account of this fiasco alone is a superb reconstruction of how “we fear this is him” became “they think it’s him” which was then “he’s been positively ID’d”. The later police backtracking was extraordinarily cack-handed, down to the unknown officer who went back to the handwritten log of the incident and added the words “not” to the line: “I believed it was him”.
Later when a maniac drove his car into crowds on Westminster Bridge, killing four pedestrians and then a police officer, he was named as Khalid Masood. Years earlier I had known him, quite well, as Adrian Ajao, a small-time drug dealer and wannabe popstar, whose brother was in my class growing up in decidedly un-Islamic 1980s Kent. I saw his band a few times and bought weed from him.
I have no hesitation in recommending this strong account of a frantic few weeks of terror in London
After this he apparently tried various enterprises — trainee manager at Woolworths, academia, getting into City trading — but was repeatedly stymied by his hot temper. This saw him getting into ever more violent fights. He was in prison when 9/11 happened – and began reading the Koran. And soon he was an unlikely Jihadist of Tunbridge Wells.
By then — he killed and died in 2017 — Islamic terror in the UK was becoming the province of lone wolves and the mentally unwell. But for a period in July 2005 it really did feel like we were on some kind of global jihad frontline.
I read much of this book while travelling on the London Underground. I’m not sure I would recommend that — several times I found myself close to having a panic attack — but I have no hesitation in recommending this strong account of a frantic few weeks of terror in London.
