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Britain’s biggest ever alleged terrorist bombing occurred on July 7, 2005, during London’s morning rush hour while all eyes were focused on the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland.

Tony Blair, immediately, returned to Downing Street to pronounce that the attack was an act in the ‘name of Islam’. Later, that day at a meeting of the Government’s national emergency committee COBRA, London’s anti-terror police chief Andy Hayman stated he suspected suicide bombers.

The official story developed quickly, four British Muslims - Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Jermaine Lindsay, 19, and Hasib Hussain, 18 had travelled on a mainline train from Luton into King’s Cross Thameslink Station in London, each carrying a heavy rucksack of explosives and then blew themselves up using home-made explosives, killing 56 and injuring 700 on three Tube trains and a double-decker bus.

This version of events was endorsed by a high-level Parliamentary inquiry and a government report, both published in May 2006 ten months after the event, based on 12,500 statements, a police examination of 142 computers and 6,000 hours of CCTV footage.

The report claimed that the bombers acted on their own, constructing explosives from chapatti flour and hair bleach mixed in the bath at a flat in Leeds, Yorkshire, and it concluded that the Muslim bombers were inspired by Al Qaeda ideology which they picked up on the internet from extremist websites.

But many people in Britain including some of the families of the dead victims and an increasing number of 7/7 survivors now claim there are inconsistencies and basic mistakes in the official version of events that need explanation.

That is why now, four years later, there is a growing demand for a full public inquiry, to answer key questions about what actually happened on that fateful day and particulalry what the Intelligence Services and the police know about the bombings.

Faced with the British Government’s refusal to hold a public enquiry some of the survivors are now taking legal action in the High Court to try to force the Home Secretary Alan Johnson to order it.

Campaigner Diana Gorodi, whose sister Michelle Otto, 46, was one of those killed, explains: ‘It’s just very hard for us to believe four people got up in the morning, put bombs together on the basis of information from the internet and managed to throw London into chaos and to create a tragedy. It’s impossible for me to believe those four individuals acted on their own.’

Central to the puzzle is which train the four Muslims caught from Luton to London on the morning of the bomb blasts - bearing in mind that the three separate Tube explosions at Edgware Road, Aldgate and King’s Cross occurred together at exactly 8.50am, followed by the red bus an hour later near Tavistock Square.

The official reports said the bombers got on the 7.40am train from Luton which would have arrived at King’s Cross in good time for them to board the Tube trains, however, the 7.40am train never ran that morning. It was cancelled.

The Government has since corrected this information saying the bombers actually caught an earlier train, the 7.25am from Luton, for the 35-minute journey to King’s Cross. It was due to arrive in the capital at 8am.

Yet this raises more questions than it answers, for this train ran 23 minutes late because of problems with the overhead line which disrupted most of the service between Luton to King’s Cross that morning. It arrived in London at 8.23am, say station officials.

A still CCTV photo of the four bombers arriving at the station in Luton is the only one of the four men together on July 7, the quality is poor and the faces of three of the bombers are unidentifiable. Controversially, no CCTV images, either still or moving, of them in London have ever been released.

This photo is timed at four seconds before 7.22am. But if this were the case, the men would have had just three minutes to walk up the stairs at Luton, buy their £22 day return tickets and get to the platform, which was packed with commuters because of the earlier travel disruptions.

BBC2 recently showed a television documentary called Conspiracy Files 7/7 which attempted to rebut some of these queries about the official version of events as conspiracy theories and in particular it focused a 56-minute amateur documentary film called 7/7 Ripple Effect which has been widely distributed on the internet.

7/7 Ripple effect suggests that four British Muslims may have been tricked by Government agents into taking part in a mock anti-terror training exercise and that pre-planted military grade explosives were detonated under the three Tube trains and on the bus to blow them up, along with other passengers and pretend they were suicide bombers in order to boost support for the war in Iraq.

The 7/7 Ripple Effect documentary asks many of the obvious question, such as, how were the identities of the bombers discovered by the police so suspiciously quickly? ‘When a body is blown up, it is destroyed. How is it that the identification papers found at the bomb scenes of these men were still intact? Were they planted?’

Why did the four bombers get return tickets to London if they were on a one-way suicide mission? Why are there no CCTV images of the four together in London even though the city has thousands upon thousands of such cameras in public places?

Why did so many survivors of the Tube bombings say that the explosions came upwards through the floor of the trains, not down, as would be the case if a backpack blew up inside? And why do no passengers on the London-bound Luton train clearly remember the four bombers with their huge rucksacks on that fateful morning?

By the most extraordinary coincidence and 7/7 Ripple Effect says it is a billion-to-one chance - there was a mock terrorist exercise going on in London that day which was by a company called Visor Security Consultants, run by former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan police Peter Power who revealed on BBC Radio 5 the same day that they were pre-empting the exact same scenario, the bombing of three underground trains and one surface vehicle.

He said: ‘At half-past nine this morning we were running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.’

Peter Power has subsequently explained that ‘early in 2005 Reed Elsevier, an organisation specialising in information and publishing that employs 1,000 people in and around London, asked us (Visor) to help them prepare an effective crisis management plan and rehearse it before sign-off. Several draft scenarios were drawn up and the crisis team themselves set the exercise date and time: 9.00am on 7 July.’

‘The test was planned as a table-top walk through for about six people (the CM team) in a lecture room with all injects simulated. Everything was on MS PowerPoint. The location of their Central London office near to Chancery Lane was chosen as one test site. With many staff travelling to work via the London underground system, the chosen exercise simulated incendiary devices on three trains, very similar to a real IRA attack in 1992, as well as other events.’

‘As there had been eighteen terrorist bomb attacks on tube trains prior to 2005, choosing the London Underground was logical rather than just prescient. With this in mind it was hardly surprising that Deutsche Bank had run a similar exercise a few days before and, prior to that, a multi-agency (and much publicised) exercise code-named Osiris II had simulated a terrorist attack at Bank tube station. Moreover, I had also taken part in a BBC Panorama programme in 2004 as a panellist alongside Michael Portillo MP et al, in an unscripted debate on how London might once again, deal with terrorist attacks, only this time it was fictional.’

‘In short, some of the research for our exercise had already been done. The scenario developed for our client even started by using fictitious news items from the Panorama programme then, as with any walk through exercise, events unfolded solely on a screen as dictated by the facilitator without any external injects or actions beyond the exercise room. Also factored into the scenario was to be an above ground fictitious bomb exploding not far from the head office of the protected Jewish Chronicle magazine where for exercise purposes, our imagined terrorists would have been aware that commuters would now be walking to work (past a building already considered a target) as some tube stations would have been closed.’

‘Of just eight nearby tube stations that fell within possible exercise scope, three were chosen that, by coincidence, were involved in the awful drama that actually took place on 7 July 2005. A level of scenario validation that on this occasion, we could have done without.’

‘An exercise that turns into the real thing is not that unusual. For example, in January 2003, thirty people were injured when a tube train derailed and hit a wall at speed. At the same time, the City of London Police were running an exercise for their central casualty bureau where the team quickly abandoned their plans and swung into action to cope with the real thing.’

What do you think? Was it a coincidence or a conspiracy? Why has Peter Power never been interviewed by the Police or security Services about his coincidental exercise? Why don’t you watch the film 7/7 Ripple effect and find out more about about why we need an independent enquiry into these tragic events.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 12:27 am and is filed under The Dark War on Terror, War blog, film review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.