Lessons of the 21/7 tube bombing
The new breed of terrorist is young, educated and homegrown
canada.com
Joseph Brean in London, National Post
Published: Saturday, February 03, 2007
In the lexicon of al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist attacks, London's 21/7 stands in prominence somewhere far behind Madrid's 3/11 and London's 7/7, barely in the same category as New York's 9/11.
This is because the bombs on the London Transport network failed and nobody died or was even injured (the only casualty was an asthma attack), and within about a week, all four alleged bombers and two other suspects had been rounded up.
But as the Crown concluded its case against them this week in a courtroom at London's famed Belmarsh Prison -- once home, at Her Majesty's pleasure, to novelist and disgraced politician Jeffrey Archer; Great Train Robbery robber Ronnie Biggs; and Steven Wright, the suspect in the recent Ipswich prostitute killings -- it became clear that 21/7 offers maybe the clearest illustration of the 21st-century phenomenon of the educated, middle class, homegrown, aspiring suicide bomber.
And in the response of security services, 21/7/05 offers a stark caveat because, in the long run and internationally, it will be remembered for what happened the next day, during the largest manhunt in London's history.
Having failed to make an accurate identification because one officer was taking a bathroom break, a botched police surveillance operation resulted in the police shooting an innocent Brazilian electrician -- wrongly suspected of wearing a suicide bomb -- seven times in the head with hollow-point bullets.
This panic, on the part of both the police and the public, reflected the widespread shock and confusion at the new breed of British domestic terror.
The alleged 21/7 bombers are not disaffected second-generation immigrants from the poor industrial north of England, as the 7/7 bombers mostly were.
Nor did they live in the socalled Balti Triangle, the largely Pakistani area of Birmingham that takes its name from the local curry dish and is home to the nine men accused this week of plotting to abduct a British Muslim soldier and film his execution.
Rather, the 21/7 plotters were mostly young men from London and, by all accounts, British to the core and deeply opposed to the war in Iraq, even if they were not all devoutly Muslim.
Listening to evidence on Thursday, for example, Hussein Osman -- suspected of trying to bomb the Shepherd's Bush Tube stop, then fleeing via France to his brother's apartment in Rome, where he was eventually arrested -- accepted a drink of water from a guard and drank it with his pinky finger extended.
The other suspects were all arrested in England.
Their alleged bomb factory was in an apartment building in a comfortable northern London suburb, then home to Yassin Omar, 26. Photos released by the court yesterday show a typical bachelor pad, with a seemingly disused kitchen littered with empty beer bottles, and apparent chemical corrosion marks on the stove. Here, police say they also found a video montage of the 7/7 attacks and hostage beheadings, a collection of radical Islamist propaganda, the text of a speech by Osama bin Laden and rubber gloves with traces of the explosive TATP (triacetone triperoxide).
It was here, the Crown alleges, that a large quantity of hydrogen peroxide, purchased from a hairstylist's supplier, was mixed with chapati flour, batteries and nails to create five backpack bombs with detonators composed of TATP. Fingerprints of four defendants were found on more than 200 bottles of the peroxide, recovered from communal garbage bins at the apartment block, police say.
As it happened, only the detonators exploded that day in the four attacks against three Tube stations and one bus. One other bomb was ditched in a west London park, allegedly after a bomber's failure of nerve.
After the failed explosion, one bomber is alleged to have said to a witness: "What's the matter, it's bread and it wasn't me, it was that [pointing to his backpack]."
Mr. Omar, fleeing the scene of one attempted bombing, allegedly demanded help and shelter from a Muslim woman, saying, "What kind of a Muslim are you, not helping another Muslim?"
And Mr. Osman, fleeing another bomb scene, is alleged to have run through the house of an elderly couple, saying, "I won't hurt you, I am just passing through."
In addition to Mr. Osman and Mr. Omar, the defendants are Muktah Said Ibrahim, 29, Manfo Kwaku Asiedu, 33, Ramzi Mohammed, 25, and Adel Yahya, 24. They have all pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to murder and cause explosions, although Mr. Ibrahim has admitted to making the bombs, and police say they found two suicide notes written by Mr. Mohammed.
"The prosecution case is that this was no hoax," said prosecutor Nigel Sweeney. "The failure of those bombs to explode owed nothing to the intention of these defendants, rather it was simply the good fortune of the travelling public that day that they were spared."
Although Mr. Sweeney alleges the attack was not a copycat and had been in the works for months, it was carried out two weeks to the day after July 7 bombings of 2005, which killed 52 people, and similarly targeted three Underground stations and one bus (the 7/7 bombs were intended for four Tube stops, but one of the bombers found himself unable to board a train in the confusion and instead detonated his bomb on the upper deck of a bus).
The plot revealed both the fortunate incompetence of amateur terrorists and the potential dangers of grooming by extremist Muslim clerics.
Five of the six defendants had been filmed by British security services on an organized camping trip to the Lake District, reminiscent of the rafting trip in Wales taken by two of the 7/7 bombers shortly before their attacks. This is a common training strategy of British al-Qaeda sympathizers.
Abu Hamza al-Masri, the notorious one-eyed hook-handed cleric whose sermons the bombers had listened to outside the notorious London Finsbury Park mosque, and who is now jailed for incitement to murder and racial hatred, is also alleged to have organized camps for his followers in Wales.
A similar training program was pursued by the alleged Toronto cell of bombers who are now before the court in Brampton on terrorism charges and who are alleged to have taken part in weapons training at a camp in Ontario cottage country.
The defence portion of the trial is expected to last several weeks, during which the defendants are expected to argue that the bombs were meant as a protest to the war in Iraq but not intended to actually explode or cause any loss of life.
© National Post 2007 |
