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Rush Hour Terror

14 minute read
Michael Elliott

As George Psaradakis, 49, drove a No. 30 double-decker red bus through the streets of London last Thursday, there were signs that something was wrong. The city’s traffic–never easy–was in a state of chaos. Thousands of commuters had left Underground train stations and were milling about the streets looking for alternative ways to get to work. Few of them had any idea of the scale of the devastation below: moments before, three bombs had gone off in the space of a minute on London’s Underground railway. Psaradakis, whose bus was packed, had been forced to divert from the main roads into the leafy squares of Bloomsbury, home to the colleges of the University of London. At 9:47 he stopped his bus in Tavistock Square to get directions. Just then, Lou Stein, an American theater producer who has lived in London for 20 years, heard a tremendous thud from his apartment 100 yards away and ran outside. “It was oddly silent,” he says, with “a lot of distressed people crying into each other’s arms. The top of the bus was lifted off, like the top of a tin can that’s just been ripped open. There was smoke everywhere.” When a TIME reporter arrived on the scene about 25 minutes later, he could see smears of blood all over the façade of the British Medical Association headquarters in the square and survivors comforting each other. Psaradakis survived, but at least 13 others died in the blast. Witnesses told of seeing severed limbs and a body with its head blown off.

The blast in Tavistock Square was the culmination of the worst attack on London since World War II. Two days after the bombings, the official toll was 49 dead–a figure expected to rise–and some 700 injured. About 100 were still in hospitals around the capital, 22 listed as “severely injured.” While the initial casualty figures were lower than in some previous attacks, such as the train bombings in Madrid in March 2004, the shock of the London bombings reverberated because they occurred in circumstances–and in a city–that are familiar to so many around the world. The first images of the hellish scenes in the London Underground came from cameras on passengers’ cell phones, the latest innovation in the grim art of terrorism documentary. While rescuers struggled to recover bodies deep in the tunnels, police became enmeshed in the painstaking forensic work that accompanies a scene of mass murder–checking out claims that a passenger on the bus had been seen fiddling with a bag, examining the chemical fingerprints of the explosives used, looking at tiny, bloodstained body parts for telltale clues.

Initial responsibility was claimed by a little-known group that said it spoke for al-Qaeda, declaring the attacks retaliation for British support of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two days after the attacks, British police said no arrests in connection with the bombings had been made. But late last week a British official told TIME that the investigation is gravitating toward the possibility that as in Madrid, the attacks involved al-Qaeda-linked Moroccans, perhaps drawn from Britain’s Moroccan community, coupled with outside guidance and bombmaking help. The official says authorities believe there may be links between the London bombers and those behind the Madrid attacks. “There’s a lot of concern that the group is still here,” the official says. “It may not presage any imminent attack. Maybe the greater danger is that they go dormant for weeks, if not months. It’s a very considerable worry.”

The links to the Madrid bombings are tantalizing. London’s Sunday Times reported that Spanish security sources are said to have warned four months ago that Mustapha Setmariam Nasar, 47, a Syrian, had identified Britain as a likely target and had set up a sleeper cell of terrorists there. Eric Denécé, who heads the French Center of Intelligence Research in Paris, says that “there is some evidence” that Nasar helped plan the Madrid attack, and that “it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’s found to have overseen London from afar as well.”

According to a confidential report produced the day after the bombing by a private London security firm, Aegis Defense Services Ltd., which was seen and read by Pentagon officials, the team was probably four to six strong, although it is technically feasible that one or two bombers conducted the attacks. A British official says that based on the method of the attacks, “they would have needed quite a number of people, possibly as many as 10.” The Aegis report says it is possible that the explosives were “constructed by an experienced bombmaker, possibly coming to the U.K. for that very purpose.”

Investigators are also looking into whether Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s top operative in Iraq, may have helped supply explosives for the London bombers. Meanwhile, a U.S. intelligence source tells TIME that last Friday a Pakistani was detained outside London at Stansted Airport, allegedly with a map of the Underground system and the three bombed train stations circled. A British official confirmed that a Pakistani had been arrested but said there was no known connection between the event at Stansted and the bombings. A source close to the interrogation of Abu-Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan arrested in Pakistan who has been in U.S. custody for six weeks and is suspected of being Osama bin Laden’s third in command, says al-Libbi told interrogators about the possibility of attacks in London and had in his possession city and Underground maps of London. U.S. authorities said there was no evidence of an imminent threat against the U.S., but a senior U.S. intelligence official told TIME that the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies have stepped up surveillance of possible terrorists or terrorist sympathizers on American soil.

The British knew it was coming. They didn’t know when, they didn’t know where, they didn’t know how. But ever since Sept. 11, 2001–ever since New York and Bali and Jakarta and Karachi and Riyadh and Casablanca and Madrid and Baghdad were hit by radical Islamic terrorists–Londoners had recognized that sooner or later, the bombers would get around to them too. “I don’t feel angry,” said research student Kevin Benish, 21, as he placed a bunch of lilies on a makeshift shrine outside King’s Cross station the next day. “I knew it wasn’t a question of if but when something like this would happen.”

The attacks came in a city that was feeling extraordinarily pleased with itself. Its population growing, its economy booming, reveling in its modern self-image as a tolerantly multicultural place, London was having fun. The weekend before the bombings, the city had hosted the last few days of Wimbledon and a Live 8 concert in Hyde Park with more than 200,000 in attendance. “London,” wrote Henry Porter in the Observer, “seems to be the hub of the world.” And that was three days before the city won the right to hold the Olympics, beating out a field that included the only other cities that have traditionally had global hublike pretensions, Paris and New York.

Then the lights went out. On Thursday morning, Chris Lowry, 17, a lawyer’s clerk, was sitting on a Piccadilly Line train outside King’s Cross when “a fat blast came from the front end. I actually think I fell out of my seat at first–all I could see was smoke.” Eventually, emergency workers moved passengers to the back of the train and up into the station, where Lowry remembers “trails of blood going up the stairways.” Nicolas Thioulouse, 27, a French architect, was in a train under Edgware Road station when a bomb exploded on a train on the adjacent track. “I had the feeling I was in a fish tank,” says Thioulouse, “seeing people in the opposite car with their faces completely covered by blood.” People tried to cheer each another up. A teenage girl had collapsed in tears but had a tissue with the word LIFE printed on it: Thioulouse told her she wouldn’t die while she was holding it. Five miles across central London, on a train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, Michael Henning heard the bomb and then saw “lots of silver”–in reality, shards of glass that sliced up the right side of his face while leaving the left side virtually untouched. “I’m still shaking out the glass,” he said on his way out of the Royal London Hospital. “I feel very, very lucky. Within 10 feet, two people must have died.”

Two of the bombs–at Aldgate and Edgware Road–were in trains just below the surface, on so-called “cut and cover” lines, so the force of the blast was dissipated into a relatively wide tunnel. Seven people died at Edgware Road and seven at Aldgate. But the bomb on the Piccadilly Line near King’s Cross was in one of the Underground’s deep tubes, some 100 ft. below the surface. There the blast had nowhere to go, and emergency workers said the scene was hellish. Twenty-one people are known to have died on the train, although as the rescuers searched for more bodies in the sweltering rat-infested tunnels, it was all but certain that the toll would rise. The bus bomb in Bloomsbury came nearly an hour later. Prime Minister Tony Blair was notified of the attacks while at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, where he was chairing the annual meeting of the G-8 group of leading industrial nations. He quickly relayed the news to the other leaders, including President George W. Bush, and then returned to London. “It is important 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,” Blair said.

But nagging questions persisted over who, precisely, had bombed London, and how they managed to penetrate the defenses of a city that for years had its guard up against just such attacks. A British source with access to intelligence reports said there were no indications of imminent attack: “There was no sign on the horizon, at all.” Indeed, exactly one month earlier, at a regular briefing with corporate executives and managers of critical infrastructure systems, MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, had downgraded its threat alert to the lowest level since Sept. 11, 2001. An aide to Blair, asked about the failure of the security services to detect the plot, said, “There will be a time to ask questions about what happened. But for now we need to let the security services get on with the very big job they have.”

An immediate focus of attention was the type of explosives used in the attack–and the nature of those who planted them. Scotland Yard insisted there was no firm evidence the attacks were carried out by suicide bombers and said that each of the bombs on the trains probably contained less than 10 lbs. of explosives. The confidential Aegis report guessed that each weighed just 5 lbs., small enough to place in a small rucksack. The bombs, police said, were placed on the floor of the train cars. In the case of the bus, shortly after the explosion a TIME reporter saw a tall, thin man in a black pinstripe suit telling police officers, “I think I saw something,” and mentioning a man with a rucksack, before the witness was whisked away. Later, passengers told the press they had seen a young man on the bus playing with a bag before the bomb went off. Scotland Yard says only that the high explosives were “not homemade.” Roland Jacquard, a French terrorism analyst with close links to the authorities in Paris, told TIME that his sources said early tests indicated that the explosives were of “military quality and provenance” and quite unlike the industrial material, stolen from mines, that was used in the Madrid bombings.

Those hunting the bombers are focused on cracking the supply chain of munitions. “We need to know more about how these cells are getting their explosives,” says a U.S. counterterrorism official. One possible source of munitions is Iraq, where insurgents and terrorists such as al-Zarqawi are known to have stockpiles of weapons and explosives. A U.S. intelligence official tells TIME that investigators are “trying to see if there’s any link in the forensics” between Iraqi explosives and the London bombs. In fact, an Italian intelligence source told TIME that British intelligence is looking into an al-Zarqawi connection. “Al-Zarqawi is a potential source since there’s an unlimited amount of explosives and munitions in Iraq that he controls,” says a second U.S. official. “So it’s just a matter of getting it out of Iraq and to the right people.”

So, who might those people be? Britain has long had a radical fringe with links to jihadist terrorist groups. In the past few years, British Muslims have been involved in terrorist plots not just in Britain but also in Pakistan and Israel. At the same time, the very openness and multiculturalism on which London prides itself–to say nothing of the relatively tough standards that police have to satisfy to make a case against political radicals–have for decades made the city a haven for jihadists from all over Europe and beyond.

Not everyone has enjoyed Britain’s tolerance. In the years before Sept. 11, 2001, French authorities despaired at what they claimed was the tendency of the British authorities to turn a blind eye to events in “Londonistan.” It was commonly known that the British kept radicals such as Abu Hamza al-Masri– formerly the imam of the notorious Finsbury Park mosque–under tight surveillance. But in some quarters there was resentment that simply keeping tabs on radicals while they were in Britain did not stop London from being used as a recruitment and logistics center for operations elsewhere. Last year a self- professed former al-Qaeda associate in Pakistan told TIME that Muslim groups in Britain had specifically asked al-Qaeda “not to disturb London or other British cities” out of fear that an attack would “greatly hamper their ideological work.”

In recent years, British authorities have taken a harder line on Islamic militants, busting suspected sleeper cells and detaining some radical clerics. Partly as a result of those actions, says Walid Phares, a professor of Middle East studies at Florida Atlantic University, “for the last six months, the tone and the language on [jihadist] websites has changed completely with regard to Great Britain. Once [jihadists] felt that the British are going after them significantly, they decided to go ahead and send the first blast.”

As the work of law enforcement got under way, the part of life that is not dictated by the fear of terrorism resumed its rhythms. At Gleneagles, Blair read a statement on aid to Africa that he said offered a “hope that is the alternative to this hatred” represented by terrorism. The leaders also made pledges to raise $3 billion per year over the next three years for the Palestinian Authority. Some British Muslims expressed worries that they would be blamed for the bombs, but London police said they had heard no specific report of an incident considered to be a direct reprisal for the bomb attacks.

For that, at least, Londoners of all races and religions were thankful. Gradually, as the sound of sirens faded and the smell of burning dissipated, the least planned, most messy, least lovable and most loved city in the world got on with what, in summer, it does best–preparing for a weekend’s gardening, setting up pints of beer, snapping on a spaghetti-strap dress for a night’s clubbing. On the steps of St. Pancras church, close to both the King’s Cross bomb and the destroyed bus, a card had been placed among the bunches of flowers laid in remembrance of the victims. “The people who did this,” it read, “should know that they have failed. They picked the wrong city to pick on.” –Reported by Theunis Bates, Maryann Bird, Jessica Carsen, Andrea Gerlin, Helen Gibson, Lillian Kennett, Adam Smith and Vivienne Walt/ London, Timothy J. Burger and Douglas Waller/ Washington, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Ghulam Hasnain/Karachi, Jeff Israely/Rome and J.F.O. McAllister/Gleneagles

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