62. Terror Strikes London: 7/7 (Ep 1)

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Breaking news we're getting from the PA Newswire that there's been reports of an explosion outside Liverpool Street Station.

Well, there may be some time we need ambulance to the walkers of Russell to King Cross.

Most Londoners actually are not going to be afraid by this.

I think they're going to continue their daily business.

We consider the attack last week on British soil an attack on the civilised world.

And what we are confronting here is an evil ideology.

It is not a clash of civilizations.

All civilized people, Muslim or other, feel revulsion at it.

Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

I am just going to make a short statement to you on the terrible events that have happened in London earlier today.

And I hope you understand that at the present time, we are still trying to establish exactly what has happened.

And there is a limit to what information I can give you, and I will simply try and tell you the information as best I can at the moment.

It is reasonably clear that there have been a series of terrorist attacks in London.

There are obviously casualties, both people that have died and people seriously injured, and our thoughts and prayers, of course, are with the victims and their families.

It is important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

And that is Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, speaking at Glen Eagles on the morning of July the 7th, 2005.

And now this episode is launching, Gordon, on this is July the 7th of 2025.

And this is the 20th anniversary of what has come to be known as the 7-7 7-7 attacks, the 7-7 bombings in London.

I believe the largest terrorist attack in London's history.

And on this series, On The Rest is Classified, we are going to talk about those attacks, the investigation to uncover exactly what happened, and what it all means 20 years later for the UK.

That's right.

I mean, 52 people killed, shocked the country.

Kind of seminal moment for the UK.

And I covered it at the time as a journalist.

There's lots of coverage about different aspects of it, about what happened, about the victims, about the first responders, mean some documentaries.

But I think what we want to do in this series is give a real insight from the rest is classified perspective.

So particularly looking at the role of MI5,

giving a sense of what it does, how it responded, about counter-terrorist investigations, about some of those questions, about whether it missed anything involving the attack, but also look at it in the context of the role of al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and its role behind not just 7-7, but another attempted attack two weeks later, which I don't think is always fully understood or appreciated.

So I think this will be a particular way of telling the story with that lens in mind.

Yeah, kind of a, I guess, a deep dive into how exactly counter-terrorism investigations are run.

And I mean, I guess, and to set some of the context, maybe for listeners who aren't as familiar with these attacks, I mean, as I come to this, I mean, is is it fair to say that this was something akin to the UK's 9-11?

I mean, which might, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but just to kind of paint the picture of how big of a deal this was.

I mean, what would you say?

Well, it's interesting, isn't it?

Because I don't think it was quite the UK's 9-11, because we'd got used to some degree of terrorism in the UK, particularly from Northern Ireland.

So you'd had terrorist attacks going back, particularly from the 70s onwards.

And we'd had some hints of al-Qaeda-like violence, so it didn't quite come out of the blue in the way that 9-11 did, nor the scale of 9-11.

So I think there was certainly shock, which we'll come to, but it was perhaps arguably more predictable that something like this would happen than 9-11, I think, for the United States.

So important, but maybe not quite the seismic in that sense.

And I suppose it is happening in the context of the broader conflict with al-Qaeda, kind of charity on the general, which is really hot

in the mid-2000s.

So maybe, I mean, go to 7-7, 2005.

It's summer.

It's London.

Yeah, it was a great summer's day in some ways because London is waking up on the 7th of July, 2005, still basking in the very happy news that the previous day it had won the right to hold the 2012 Olympics in London.

And it was a victory all the sweeter because we beat Paris.

Beat the French.

Beat the French.

Always good.

Because they were convinced they were going to get to hold the Olympics in 2012.

Well, I think we won by four four votes.

So, you know, there was a huge party actually that day.

And there was, you know, parties in Trafalgar Square in the centre of London.

Bit of a hangover the next morning.

It was a big deal.

Tony Blair is the Prime Minister.

Now, interestingly enough, he's not in London.

And this is part of the story because he's hosting world leaders.

in Scotland.

And you read from his reaction at the start at Glen Eagles.

That had started the day before on July the 6th.

Amongst those attending, our president, George W.

Bush, who's had a bike accident.

Just casually biking around Klineagles.

He was on his bike, being action man, I guess.

And he goes around a corner, and there's police all around the site.

And he lifts his arm from the handlebars to kind of wave and say hello to a police officer.

And someone stuck a stick right in the smoke.

Oh, no.

I think he just comes off

and he crashes into the police officer who ends up in crutches.

Also present.

He's actually crutches.

Yeah, at least legitimate accidents.

Yeah, no, George W.

Bush is okay.

But it's a poor police officer.

He's a police officer.

But also present in the UK for this summit, which tells you how long ago it was, was Vladimir Putin.

Wow.

So different era because it's the G8 rather than the G7 leaders.

So that's London that morning.

But then at 8.49,

something happens on the tube system that morning.

It's rush hour.

And at first, no one knows what.

In the next few minutes, there's two more incidents on the tube network.

No one is sure what or why.

Now, there's a kind of avalanche of messages coming into operators on the transport and emergency services at that time.

And it is really hard for them to understand what had happened, partly because it's taken place underground and between tunnels.

And there are very few eyewitnesses.

So it's very confusing just understanding what it is, where it's happened, and when it's happened.

So they're getting a multitude of kind of messages into the people running the tube network, which is consistent with some kind of explosion, and it could be a bomb, but also with other possible causes, including the rupture of high-tension cables or the loss of a bulk supply point, very technical reasons why you could have those signals.

So as of 9 a.m., so about 10 minutes after the first thing, they're still not saying it's terrorism, but the suspicions are certainly growing that

something serious is going on because you've got multiple reports of this.

Now, I can remember this quite vividly because I was in the office of the BBC then, which was in Shepherd's Bush.

And the first reports around 9.23 on the BBC were about an explosion, but still not clear that it's a bomb.

So still, the explosion could have been caused by a power surge and i was asked to look into it and so just after about 9 45 i remember getting on the phone to someone at mi5 and said you know do you know what it is and they said too early to tell this is a very vivid memory because as i was talking to them on the phone we had a kind of internal messaging system where internal messages information news wires stuff from the public would all kind of come in and you could see it and it would flash up if something was urgent and as i was on the phone actually with this contact something flashed up on the screen and it was a message saying eyewitnesses had called into the newsroom because they'd seen the roof blow off a bus on Tavastock Square now that had happened at 947 a.m.

and I actually remember reading that message to this MI5 contact who immediately just hung up the phone and you know the reason was that something happening on a bus above the roof

and the tube tells you suddenly this is not just something going on underground.

Was that news to your MI5 contact?

Well, yeah, and I think it was.

And, you know, that's what's interesting is that you think that inside somewhere like MI5 or any kind of intelligence agency, security agency, they know everything that's going on immediately.

But the reality is this stuff is just happening.

Yeah.

And often news organizations have got more of a network out there and they're getting the information as fast as they are.

No, I think there is something to that is that these security organizations, I mean, the CIA was certainly this way, but sometimes you had to feel that because of the kind of protective shell you've you've got around the organization, the real-time stuff doesn't always get in as quickly.

When something's really unfolding in the moment, it takes time for intelligent security services to get their messages processed and, you know, checked, whereas that news organization is often faster.

But you know at that point then that it's

a terrorist attack.

Yeah, it certainly looks it.

So MI5, worth explaining a little bit about what it is, I guess, because people, particularly if they're not from the UK, may not know that much about it.

Domestic security service, so you know, we've talked quite a lot on the pod, haven't we, about MI6, which is the secret intelligence services and does the spying abroad.

MI5 deals with domestic threats, founded 1909, and for most of its history, had been a kind of spy-catching service, looking first for German spies, then Russian spies through the Cold War.

But it does start to work on terrorism, particularly from the 1970s, Northern Ireland, and, you know, from the 1990s, it's looking to move more into terrorism in terms of dealing with it.

And so wrestles control of dealing with Northern Irish terrorism from the police special branch.

So that's its kind of newer role.

And you're starting to see the signs of Islamist terrorism in the 1990s internationally, but not that much in the UK.

So the time of 9-11, 2001, it's got about 2,000 staff and it's growing to deal with this threat because 9-11 makes clear it's there.

But it's still kind of expanding.

It's still in that process of growth rather than being that big.

I found an official report from the time and it it said the total number of desk officers in the international counterterrorism section looking at Islamist work numbered in the tens at times.

Because if you think about the episodes that we did on Osama bin Laden, we talked about the explosion in staffing in the CIA's counterterrorism center.

Now, it's not exactly apples to apples here, it's the CIA's externally facing.

The CIA probably over the same period from 2001 to 2005 in a counter-terrorism center, it probably grew by 10 times.

Yeah.

Something like that.

This is shockingly small, I think.

Yeah.

Relative to that.

I mean, even if it's kind of ticking up slowly growth-wise, the absolute number here

seems remarkably low to me.

I found that amazing.

And as of June 2005, they've got about 16 operations running looking at the facilitation of attacks in the UK and 26 overseas.

Five potential suicide bombers in the UK.

These are all from official figures.

They're also looking at kind of people sending people out to Iraq to get involved there and fight there.

I guess there would have been a lot of concern of people coming back from Gihad and Iraq and then planning attacks here.

So they're busy, but I think crucially there's no warning of 7-7.

One of the things I remember this coming out is that the threat level, nowadays it's public.

Then it used to be secret, but at that time it's actually gone down in May 2005 from something called Severe General to Substantial because it was judged there was not a group which was very British names for severe general.

Severe General to Substantial.

It's funny.

They were not public.

So I guess they were people on the inside.

It wasn't like the US kind of color-coded system that came out after 9-11.

No, no.

They're public now, but actually, at that time, that was still a secret.

It was for kind of government officials to know.

But it just shows it had gone down.

It's gone down.

So

7-7 is going to come as a shock.

It is going to come out of the blue.

As I said, you know, you've got this sense in which they are watching it unfold on TV.

MI5 is divided into branches, and G branch is the counter-terrorism branch.

The new recently appointed head is a guy called Andrew Parker, who's later going to become the head of all of MI5.

He's watching events unfold on a TV news screen like everyone else, you know, and he's running that kind of counterterrorism team.

The question here, is it an intelligence failure?

There's different types of intelligence failures.

There's failures where you have the dots in your system and you don't connect them.

And then I guess there's the type which maybe this is starting to feel like based on the way we've described it so far, which is there weren't any dots to connect, meaning that you actually didn't penetrate the group that was intending to attack you.

It's a really good question because I think this question is, is it an intelligence failure?

In a sense, your job is to stop attacks if something happens.

By definition, by definition, there's an element of failure because you fail to have any intelligence about the group.

Now, sometimes it's because you've failed to collect it, sometimes you fail to put it together.

I think the truth is there are elements of both there.

And I think we'll maybe through the series answer those questions.

And I think it's it's a really good question to hold in mind.

Could they have stopped it?

Could they have somehow either put together the information or collected the information to stop it?

And I think maybe rather than try and answer it now, we'll get to that question through the series.

And by the end, maybe we'll let people have a think about how they'd answer it.

I mean, I guess the other lens to take, just thinking again to the bin Laden series with the parallel of just it's a it's a terrorist attack is do you have strategic warning yeah versus something actionable you can use to disrupt the plot?

Because I think in 2001, on the bin Laden case, the CIA provided an immense amount of strategic warning that something was coming, but nothing that would have actually enabled the U.S.

to stop the attack.

And here, I mean, the threat level declining would sort of suggest

that you missed the strategic warning.

I think it is definitely true they didn't see it coming in the broader or the specific sense.

So G1 is the branch, and G is the counter-terrorist branch, and G1 is the branch here dealing with the kind of Islamist counter-terrorists.

The lettering is confusing, yeah, to me, as in America, because we don't do this at the CIA.

Right, we don't have ABCD.

No, it's not, yeah, it's not this like anodyne sort of alphabetical thing, right?

It's just the name, it's kind of semi-public, but it's not really well known,

yeah, not super public.

So, within G Branch, they're going to set up that morning what's called a security service emergency room, and that's the kind of ops room for a high-tempo event.

Nowadays, they're called intelligence operations centers, and they've got a room specifically to do that.

But in those days, they basically had to just set one up.

You find a conference room and you pull people into it and you create an emergency room which is going to deal with it.

People are going to be working 12-hour shifts.

It's going to become littered with pizza boxes.

Andrew Parker, who, as I said, has just become the head of Countertoism, tells the staff there to pick up the phone, call your families, tell them you're fine, and then tell them you're not coming home.

It's going to be codenamed Operation Stepford.

It's kind of an odd code name.

Where do the code names come from?

In MI5.

MI5 and police code names are kind of randomly generated.

That's what every security service says, though, right?

But then I guess no one would have chosen Stepford.

Stepfood.

No.

And we'll come on to some of the others because some of the others are even weirder for the related counter-terrorism.

I think it's a different one.

Yeah, I think.

So there's also this sense, I think, within MI5 that everyone wants to do something.

But what can you do at that moment?

Because something's happened.

You've got bombs going off, but they're waiting for the first leads to come in from the scene.

And that's going to take time because it's so hard to get access, particularly underground to those sites where the bombs have gone off and collect any evidence they're asking is there any intelligence from gchq the listening agency or from mi6 or for their own agents that they might have missed any chatter about an upcoming attack and the answer is no another question they're asking is where are sois now sois are subjects of interest which is basically their targets for surveillance are there any of the ones that they're watching who've gone missing are there any who they've been carrying out surveillance of any of the hundreds of people who might be involved in this attack?

Can you account for them?

And all of their top SOIs, you know, there's no sign that they're missing.

And you've also got all these teams within MI5, and you can imagine it kind of running around going, what can we do?

Something big's happened.

You know, what can we ask our agents who we're running?

The tech ops team are saying, you know, what can we do?

And the answer is, you actually can't do that much until you've got some leads to chase.

So in 2005, if you're trying to find a subject of interest,

what does that actually practically look like?

Like, what are they doing?

This isn't an MI5 asset.

An SOI is a potential terrorist.

Right.

And so is it calling the police to then have them go and check to see if the person's at home or is it checking to see if their phone is active in a particular part of the country?

I guess it depends on how high they up your target list as well.

How much surveillance you've got of them.

Because only if someone's at the top of the list and you're worried about them doing something imminently, would you have them under actually constant surveillance as opposed to just occasional surveillance or knowledge of what's going on.

So yeah, there'll be a kind kind of different process depending on how worried you were and how much surveillance you got on them, whether it's just checking their phones or whether it's actual physical surveillance or whether it's something else around them.

And also for our American listeners, then, because you don't have a constitution,

you can

the people that MI5 might be surveilling here.

Yeah.

What is the legal process by which you would put somebody under surveillance?

So it's a good question.

You need a warrant.

You do need a warrant.

You still need a warrant.

You definitely need a warrant signed by the Home Secretary.

You can't just do it on the Queen's signature.

Well, that is a kind of a Queen's signature through the Home Secretary

this time.

But depending on the level of surveillance and intuition.

So if you want like a full phone tap on someone, so you want to actually be intercepting the content of their phone calls, you need a warrant signed by the Home Secretary.

So that's fairly high bar.

There's lower bars, depending if it's a lower level of surveillance that you might want on someone.

Okay.

So

we have laws.

We may not have a constitution.

We've got laws.

Thank you for checking.

I'd like to mention at least quarterly on this podcast that you don't have a constitution.

Thank you very much.

We do fine without one.

Thank you.

Now, meanwhile, the Prime Minister, as we made clear, is up in Scotland.

12.05, as you read at the start, you know, says it's clear it's terrorism.

He's going to fly down at lunchtime.

That morning, though, before that, there's already the first meeting of something called Cobra.

Now, that's a better code.

That's a good code.

That's a code name.

And that's Cabinet Office Briefing Room,

which is less exciting.

But Cobra sounds good.

And that's the government emergency room.

That's our equivalent of the situation.

Where does A come from?

Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.

Okay.

But really, it's Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.

But it sounds better to call it Cobra.

It does.

And so they have their first meeting at 10 a.m.

when things are really unclear.

You haven't got the Prime Minister there yet.

People are struggling to get there.

The roads are clogged.

And at that point, in the morning, they're still unclear how many explosions, even and how many scenes they're dealing with.

No one knows.

Attending that Cobra is Eliza Manning and Buller.

Now, she is the head of MI5,

and she's going to be a kind of an important character in this story.

We should say we're also going to be talking to her for our club members for a bonus episode.

She's been head of MI5 since 2002, second woman to run it after Stella Remington and she'd grown up in the world of security because her father had been attorney general and had actually prosecuted spies like George Blake.

More importantly though, her mother had kept spy pigeons in World War II.

That is, yeah, that's more important.

That's more important.

And she'd been in the English teacher for a while, then she's talent spotted to MI5.

She's going to rise up the ranks and working on terrorism as well as espionage.

But, you know, 7-7 is really an unprecedented test of leadership for an MI5 director because we'd never had anything quite like it.

How long are MI5 directors typically in that role?

She's been there for three years at this point.

Three to five, you know, maybe a bit longer.

Yeah.

I think in MI5 there was a sense that they'd kept a clean sheet and now suddenly they hit out the blue.

And so I think there is a real sense of shock.

and she's going to speak to to staff over at the tannoy that day people remember and address staff what is a tanoi a tannoy is like a loudspeaker okay so it just means you can reach all the rooms normally you do it for like the fire alarm message yeah

it's a loud yeah

okay and she you know she says what happened is what we've feared been warning about and worked so hard to prevent this is what you are all here for people remember her saying and you know a lot of people who heard it said it was very powerful and that she's going to come into her her own as a leader.

She actually sends, it's interesting, about a third of the staff home, which surprises some ministers because she knows she needs them fresh.

Seems like a wise move.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That this isn't going to be a two-day sprint.

Yeah, exactly.

It's going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

So the call is going to go out.

We need as many, as many people as possible with counter-terrorist experience in MI5.

And you need to rest some of those people.

So at that point, the priority is to find out who did this.

And the fear is it's going to be similar to you had the Madrid bombs in 2004, which are pretty terrible when bombs again left on the transport system at Rush Hour.

And in that case, the bombers escaped and planned more attacks.

So that is the fear.

That does make it extremely troubling, doesn't it, for everyone in that situation room or that conference room?

Because you're thinking,

not only did we miss this potentially, but are we going to miss another wave?

So maybe there we take a break.

And when we come back, we'll see how the investigation rolls on to uncover exactly what happened on 7-7.

See you off to the break.

Well, welcome back.

We are in the emergency room with MI5 on July the 7th, 2005.

And I'd imagine, Gordon, at this moment, there's a ton of probably useless information that is flooding the security service.

But really, the key here, I guess, is to determine, well, who actually set off these bombs?

Are they suicide bombs?

So, I mean, how does MI5 get into this business of identifying the bombers?

Yeah, and as we said beforehand, they have no intelligence about it.

And then suddenly you get a flood because you've got people phoning in from the public, of course, going, I've seen something suspicious.

You know, there's all kinds of messages which are flooding the system.

And there's a lot of rubbish that has to be sifted through.

There's warnings of more attacks, there's wild speculation.

I actually went back and looked at some of my kind of messages from the day, and someone passed on a tip, which I remember getting, which was said a CIA inside source, whatever that was, said that US intelligence had picked up information this week through an untested informant that several mujahideen had been dispatched to London and Rome via Turkey to conduct terrorist operations now obviously rubbish who's sending that yeah I don't know I mean it just was coming through I think an American contact saying I've heard this from the CIA all kinds of stuff was just buzzing around the system there was an assumption though I think at the time

And this is interesting that it was an assumption that people had come into the country, had left bombs and then escaped again abroad.

Okay.

And it was interesting.

That was the kind of initial assumption in those first few hours.

And actually, the reality was going to be very different and harder to confront.

I mean, that's, if you like, the 9-11 model as well, isn't it?

People have come into the country to carry out the attack from abroad.

And also, it's maybe easier to deal with that.

I think you don't want it to be Brits.

Exactly.

So there's no intelligence leads.

And finding out who the bombers were is going to involve police work at the scene.

So this is where the police are really leading the investigation.

It's forensics and it's CCTV images.

At this point is London entirely blanketed in CCTV cameras?

Yeah it is pretty big at the time.

Although one of the interesting things going back is for instance when the bus blew up they go and look for the CCTV on the bus and it's not working and so it's one of the kind of terrible tragedies.

Actually there's lots of the CCTV cameras including on some of the trains.

They are not working.

So you think CCTV is perfect, but it's pretty imperfect, I think people at the time would say.

I think that is a theme of in general, spy tech that will probably cut across every series we do, and that definitely cuts across any kind of interview I do with former CIA case officers or FBI special agents, which is a lot of this stuff breaks all the time in the same way that all of our personal tech we have issues constantly with our computers and phones and cameras.

Like, it's the same case in the spy world.

Whether it's CoveCom, whether it's CCTV, it's like a lot of this stuff just doesn't work.

Yeah, and that's definitely the case here.

So the investigation is really focusing on the forensics at the scene.

And they start to make a series of breakthroughs.

Now, these aren't public at the time, but that first night, just before midnight on the 7th of July, they find a brown leather wallet at the scene of one of the bombs, which includes a bank card with the names Mr.

Sadiq Khan and also a snooker membership card for a Mr.

S.

Tanwir.

Then the next evening, they find another bank card, but at Edgware Road for a Mr.

S.

Khan.

Now, that's quite a common name and initials, but the fact that two different sites, the same possible name, is interesting.

The next day, they link the cards to addresses, a Mohammed Sadiq Khan in Batley, West Yorkshire, and a Shahzad Tamwir also nearby in Leeds.

How do they get from those common names to an address?

I guess you've got the bank card.

You can start to trace through the bank card and the name.

And they're going to find other items as well.

They're going to find another set of items in the name of a Hasib Hussain from the bus, and that's linked to a missing person's report for Hasib Hussain from his family.

And police are going to go visit the family and they say well he traveled to London with his friends Mohammed Sadiq Khan and Shahzad Tanwir so it's starting to come together by the 10th you know and his brother says little in front of the parents but then passes on details of a burner phone to police which leads to a address then on the 12th of July

these three individuals Mohammed Sadiq Khan, Tamwir and Hussain are identified from CCTV at King's Cross.

And at the same time, pathologists in a pretty gruesome process are identifying which people were in close proximity to the bombs, and then they're matching it to the IDs.

And actually, don't want to get too detailed, but from the location of some of the body parts, you can work out it was suicide bombers and that the bombs were at ground level.

And then that same day, they also get CCTV from a Luton railway station pointing to another person, Jermaine Lindsay, joining the other three on the morning of the attack.

So crucially, by now, by about the 12th of July, you've got a picture of it.

And what's crucial is that it's suicide bombers.

That's what the pathology and the forensics are telling you.

And that they're British.

The suicide bomber point, I mean, as grisly as it is, does that give you maybe some hope that it's over?

Yeah.

That it's a single wave, they've all killed themselves, and that there isn't another attack coming?

Yeah, I guess in theory, there could be, but the fact that you don't have someone on the loose potentially who was a bomber, who had planted the bombs, maybe gives you some measure

so i think that's a good way of putting it i think there's a kind of combination of reassurance that they're not still out there

but shock that it's british suicide bombers and i think inside mi5 people have got used to the idea that you might get homegrown which is a kind of i think unpleasant phrase but attackers because they'd seen some plots involving homegrown attacks they'd also heard talk about martyrd operations but often abroad that people are going to do those in iraq and afghanistan they hadn't seen it before but I think MI5 were kind of aware of the possibility, but I think for the public, I think it's much more of a shock.

I think the idea that it was people within the UK who want to kill their fellow citizens by blowing them up on the tube and the bus, I think that was really unsettling for people.

Over this now, I guess, five-day period from the 7th to the 12th, what did London feel like?

Was there a fear that there was more coming?

And so people are sort of maddened.

Is the tube shut?

So there was fear, but what was really noticeable, and I remember this really vividly, was how quickly people wanted to say, we are not going to be cowed by terrorists and we're going to get back to normal.

So they're trying to get the transport system back up and moving on the 7th of July, and it is back up and moving.

So some places are, but they're trying to get London moving.

I remember people kind of talking about it and saying, we are not going to be stopped by this.

We are going to try and get back to normal.

So it was a slightly odd atmosphere.

It was both...

unreal, but also people trying to get back to real life.

Yeah.

Stiff upper lip kind of mentality.

Yeah, definitely.

Lit spirit.

You know, I I think people did make references to that.

And I think that was the feeling.

So on the 12th of July, the investigation is really moving fast.

And there's raids of properties, including 18 Alexandra Grove up north.

The bomb factory.

It's a ground floor flat near student accommodation, rented out to Jermaine Lindsay.

Now, police are very nervous when they go in because they're worried the whole place could be wired.

And that's obviously a risk.

They find the place because they connect his name to the lease.

Yep.

And to the Hasib Hussain family, who, through a burner phone, they work out that a place has been rented out and that they've been visiting there and they see a couple of the names associate themselves with this place.

So they go in there and the place is a mess.

It's chaos.

Most of the bomb-making equipment is still in place.

It's clear it was the bomb factory.

There's an overpowering stench and then crucially there's a bathtub full of gunk and it's later described by police officers as looking like the top of a cheese pizza when you've taken it just out of the oven, like a kind of bubbling on top.

Now, forensic investigators will be able to establish from all of this material that the bombs consisted of several kilograms of high explosive containing mainly hydrogen peroxide with an improvised detonator, which had then been carried in rucksacks.

But what's really noticeable, and we'll come back to this, is that they're very unusual devices.

So, in fact, it's the first time that these specialists at the Met Police Bomb Squad, who've, to be fair, seen a lot of devices over the years, but it's the first time they've seen this type of bomb in the UK or pretty much anywhere in the world.

And so there is a real question at this moment.

Well, how did these guys come up with this really unusual bomb design?

And that's an important question we'll come back to.

But yeah, crucially, they know it's suicide bombers and it's no longer a manhunt.

And I guess from the, I guess, the standpoint of the investigation, the uniqueness...

could also be a signature.

If someone in some terrorist group somewhere has a particular knowledge set around making this type of bomb, In theory, it could help you track down who's ultimately responsible for dispatching these guys or radicalizing them or equipping them.

And I think that is going to be a really interesting part of the investigation is who designed the bomb and who gave them the instructions, if you'd like to do that, because it's not something you could find on the internet or you could do yourself.

But they've got a sense then of who these people might be.

Now, I don't want to get too deep into the personalities of the bombers.

I think there is something about not overly humanizing them and giving them too much attention when you don't do it for the victims.

But I think it's important to know just a little bit about them because it comes that question about the investigation about the links to al-Qaeda, Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is part of this story, as well as whether they could have been stopped or caught by MI5.

So Mohammed Sadiq Khan, often known as MSK, is effectively the ringleader, born in 1974.

So he's at 30 at the time of the bombings, born in Leeds, Yorkshire, Pakistani immigrant family, clashes with his family, moves away from their more traditional form of Islam to a more austere Wahhabism, more extreme fundamentalism, and a marriage as well to a woman called Tasina Pastel.

Also seems to be a break with the family.

So he's going to get drawn into the jihadist world going back a few years through a combination of things.

One was the issue of Kashmir.

province recently been in the news disputed between Pakistan and India and he'll start raising funds and actually is going to start going to camps linked to the kashmiri jihad in pakistan and also drawn into the circles of radical extremist preachers in britain we talked a bit about that in some of our bin laden episodes haven't we about the fact that there are preachers like abu hamza at finsbury park mosque around whom circles of extremism grow so he's moving in these kind of jihadist circles even pre-911 and then certainly after it and he's clearly the leader then he draws in some of the others shahzad Tanwiya, who's a few years younger, 22.

Another younger person, Hasib Hussein, who's 18.

All those three are from Beeston in Leeds, and they're of Pakistani heritage.

The fourth, more unusual, Jermaine Lenzi, he's only 19 at the time.

He's actually born in Jamaica and then comes to the UK, converts to Islam, and also falls under the sway of kind of radical Jamaican heritage preacher operating in the UK.

That's the makeup of the group who've all coalesced around Mohammed Sadiq Khan.

But going back to that investigation, I think the big moment for MI5 comes on July the 9th.

We talked a bit about how this security service emergency room has been set up.

They're receiving the exhibits from the police, the names.

Junior staff, straight out of induction, I think, are logging these details and they're checking them against their databases.

And they check the names Mohammed Sadiq Khan and Shahzad Tamwir against their database.

And I think to their surprise, they find that they have appeared previously in another counter-terrorist operation run by MI5, which was codenamed Crevis.

A bit of a rough codename.

It is a bit of a rough code name.

And I mean, definitely a randomly generated.

Definitely randomly generated.

And I think one of the questions will be, did something fall between the gaps?

That's going to be one of the...

questions which makes the code name even more telling and and that is going to be one of the questions because they've realized they've seen at least two of the attackers before in their investigations and so that will raise the question what did they know about them?

And in some way, could they have foreseen the attacks?

Well, and maybe there, Gordon, with that question, which I think is going to hang over, I mean, this entire series, could this have been stopped?

Let's end.

And when we come back next time, we will see exactly how this investigation unfolds now that MI5 knows it maybe had some dots to connect.

But we would be remiss, I suppose, before letting people go if we didn't say that for those who want to get access to this entire four-part series right now and our interview with Eliza Manningham Buller, the director of MI5 at the time, go and join the Declassified Club

at the Restisclassified.com.

And you can get access to this entire series right now and that episode with Eliza that will be only available to club members.

But, of course, if you don't want any of that, we don't hold it against you.

And the episodes will be out as normal.

We will see you next time.

See you next time.