After more than six months, hundreds of witnesses and millions of words in evidence, the coroner is today delivering verdicts on the victims of the deadly 2005 terrorist attacks on London. What have we learned from the inquests?
1. The line between life and death is very thin, and very arbitrary
Patrick Barnes and Philip Beer travelled together from Borehamwood every morning, but on 7 July 2005, the service was slow and they got to the Piccadilly line 15 minutes later than usual. They were standing face to face, holding on to a bar, when Barnes felt as if he had been hit on the head with a brick. It was a moment or two until he came round to hear the screams. Barnes shouted through the smoke for his friend, whom he couldn't see: "Are we going to die?" "No," said Beer, "everything's going to be fine."
In the smoke and confusion, Barnes was able to stagger from the scene, but he couldn't find his friend. Beer, wedged tightly against him when the bomb exploded, died in the carriage.
Again and again, the shattering testimonies of the witnesses to 7 July have underlined how very thin the line was between life and death, and the apparent arbitrariness of who survived and who did not.
Catherine al-Wafai, sitting five feet from the suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan on the Edgware Road train, walked off the tube in a daze and made it all the way home, wearing only one shoe. Philip Duckworth, standing next to Shehzad Tanweer near Aldgate, was blown from the carriage and staggered from the scene, with just a small piece of the bomber's shin bone in his eye. Others who were further away from the bomb sites, however, did not make it.
In some cases survival depended on the chance intervention of others. Martine Wright and Andrew Brown both lost legs in the Aldgate bomb but their lives were saved because they were sitting near the carriage door, and because Elizabeth Kenworthy, an off-duty police officer who climbed into the carriage, was able to reach them, tie tourniquets around their limbs and keep them calm. The young man rolling on the floor a little further into the carriage appeared much less badly injured, so she was "very, very upset" to learn that Richard Ellery had died.
Others made it thanks to reserves of will that they probably had no idea they had. Philip Patsalos, a university professor, recalled feeling his leg after the King's Cross blast and finding it "rather mushy". "I started thinking to myself, I've got to stay alive, I'm going to die here." He concentrated on counting his breaths in and out, keeping himself calm. When the emergency services arrived, he was so still they walked past him, thinking that he too was dead.
"I said, 'Sir, help me, I'm dying,'" he told the inquests. "Did he respond?" asked the lawyer. "Yes."
2. 7 July was a global atrocity
For much of the past five months, a number of news organisations have reported the 7 July inquest largely in their London news bulletins, as if only the capital had been attacked. But it is not merely the fact that this was the biggest terrorist assault in British history, barring Lockerbie, that makes 7/7 an atrocity against the entire country – and much further afield. The timing and location of the bombs, attacking commuters at rush hour on London's socially levelling transport network, meant that they killed both bankers and students, cleaners and consultants, many from far beyond the capital.
Ellery, a shop assistant at Jessops in Ipswich, was visiting for a one-day course. Michael "Stan" Brewster worked for Derbyshire county council and was in the capital for a conference. Jennifer Nicholson commuted from Reading, James Adams from Peterborough, Adrian Johnson from Nottinghamshire. Marie Hartley died on a day trip from Lancashire.
The attacks also acutely illustrated London's status as a global microcosm in which, with brutal irony, different cultures habitually live, work and travel together in peace, side by side. The dead of 7 July had origins in at least 23 countries: Montserrat and Mauritius, Kenya and Poland, Sri Lanka and New Zealand and Ghana.
Sam Ly's family had had fled Vietnam for Australia as refugees in the 1970s; he had travelled to London on a working holiday. Atique Sharifi's parents were killed by the Taliban when he was a child; he came to Britain in 2002, unable to speak any English, to earn money to support his younger sister in Afghanistan. Gladys Wundowa had worked in a salt mine as a child in her native Ghana to raise money for her siblings; she became a maid for a Lebanese family, moved to London, found work as a cleaner and had embarked on a course in housing management when she died. Two thousand people attended her funeral in her home village in Ghana.
It wasn't only London that mourned.
3. Crises turn some people into heroes
How would you react if the railway carriage or bus in which you were travelling was destroyed by a suicide bomb? Would you flee, mindful of your family and your own survival? Would you dare walk down a tube tunnel towards a loud bang, not knowing whether the line's electric current was off? Would you climb into a smoke-filled carriage filled with scenes of unspeakable carnage? For those following the inquests, those questions have been unspoken but ever present.
It is not easy to predict what makes a hero. Certainly many of those who risked their lives to help on 7 July had experience, or some professional training, in trauma situations. Adrian Heili, whose intervention almost certainly helped to save the life of Danny Biddle, who lost both legs, an eye and his spleen in the Edgware Road blast, had served with the Austrian army in Kosovo. Group Captain Craig Staniforth, an RAF wing commander, smashed a window in his undamaged train, which had pulled up alongside the bombed Edgware Road carriage, and swung from the handrails to climb into the wreckage to help desperately injured survivors. He talked to John Tulloch, who had serious head injuries, telling him about his daughter's university applications in a desperate bid to stop him going to sleep.
Others, however, were not professionals. Events organiser Steven Desborough was being evacuated from the Aldgate train, when he turned – "I don't know why" – and climbed into the wrecked carriage. He cradled 24-year-old Carrie Taylor in the moments before she died.
"There were people that walked on and I don't blame them," Desborough was careful to say, and of course many of those who left may have calculated, rightly, that they were unable to help and would only be in the way. Others were in profound shock. It is difficult to explain the impulse that prompted a number of passengers at Aldgate to pause to take photographs of the scene even as Dr Gerardine Quaghebeur was fighting to save lives; they may not now be able to explain it themselves. But given the scale of the atrocity, and the challenges facing the emergency services in arriving at the bomb sites, there is no question that some, perhaps many, passengers' lives were saved directly because of the actions of their fellow commuters.
"I don't think you can sum up my debt of gratitude," Wright has said of Kenworthy. "People like that don't come around that often, and if it wasn't for her I would be dead."
4. The bombers were ordinary, silly young men, as well as evil murderers
Shortly before 1am on 6 July, Jermaine Lindsay, who the following day would murder 26 people on the Piccadilly line train, received a text message from Khan, the plot's ringleader. The message, though menacing in retrospect, is almost comical in its content. The pair, their texts showed, had taken to referring to each other as characters from the 1980s television programme The A Team, and riffing on tough guy BA Baracus's fear of flying.
"Yo BA big nackers," texted Khan, "you on dat plane or wat. fool."
Lindsay replied: "I ain't getting on no plane fool."
Khan may not have known at the time that Lindsay, who was married with a young child, had invited his 17-year-old girlfriend to spend the evening of 6 July in a hotel with him in London, where he promised her they would "spend some quality time together and . . . have some bad boy room service".
The pair had met at a boxing club in their home town of Aylesbury after he winked at her. They had been on a handful of dates, going for a drive to a nearby lake in his Fiat Brava, or to Milton Keynes to wander round a shopping centre. On that occasion he asked her if she knew how to get hold of a gun, since he was going to London with some mates "to teach some people a lesson".
Throughout the inquest a vivid and unsettling picture has emerged of the four bombers, who – as well as being murderous plotters directed by phonecalls from an as-yet unidentified terrorist mastermind in Pakistan – were also banal, sometimes silly, often very ordinary young men.
Tanweer also had a secret girlfriend whom he had met as a teenager, and courted by taking for late-night drives in his car. She knew of his obsession with cricket and jiu-jitsu, but thought he wasn't particularly religious. They had moved apart but stayed in contact, and got together again in early 2005. She felt he loved her, she said, and they made plans for the future, though she was puzzled by the blond tones in the hair on his head and arms – in fact, they had been bleached by the hydrogen peroxide he had been preparing in the bomb factory. The night before the bombings he played cricket with friends in a nearby park.
Khan, too, was a complicated character, greatly respected in the primary school where he was a learning mentor, though teachers had expressed concerns about his hardline views. The man regarded as a father figure was at the same time using his position to try to convert children as young as 11 to his brand of radical Islam.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the inquests heard, when he was still a young teenager, Hasib Hussain had passed a note to his fellow school pupils which read: "You're next."
Hussain, 18 when he died, had told his teachers that he wanted to go to university, but dropped out of school a week before it was due to finish at the end of June 2005. A week after that he murdered 13 people on the number 30 bus.
5. Though many individuals were heroic, the emergency response fell short
PC Dave Hill, normally employed as a diplomatic protection officer for the Metropolitan police, was driving with colleagues along the Thames when they heard reports of unexplained explosions at Edgware Road. They raced to the scene where Hill entered the tunnel and climbed into the mangled carriage – "because I was there". The officer, who wept while recalling the scenes he had witnessed, may have directly saved a number of lives through his actions; he was far from alone among emergency-service professionals in acting without a second thought to save others.
But, however inspiring the individual acts of heroism preformed by police officers, firefighters and paramedics, the uncomfortable truth is that the emergency services' response to 7 July was hampered by delays, communication failures, tactical confusion and a jobsworth adherence to protocol that at times defied common sense.
Again and again, survivors spoke of the appalling wait for rescuers, even as they felt themselves slipping ever closer to death. Fire crews did not arrive at Edgware Road until an hour after the attacks. The first paramedic on the scene called urgently for ambulances; he learned later that ambulances from two stations nearby had not been dispatched. Paramedics intended for Russell Square were sent to the wrong location, meaning they also arrived almost an hour after the attack.
Firefighters arrived at King's Cross station at 9.13am but did not go to the scene of the blast until 9.42am because of communication protocols. Police and firefighters were forced to use runners between tunnels and station concourses because their radio system at the time did not work underground.
Most worrying, perhaps, was what emerged at the inquest about the "Gold" command centre at London Ambulance Service headquarters. This was a scene of barely contained chaos, in which staff could not log on to computers, messages were scribbled on pieces of paper and subsequently lost, and a single operator was handling every 999 call and radio message relating to the four bomb sites. Three hours after the first attacks, the inquest heard, those in charge of the ambulance response were still unclear about how many bombs had exploded and where. Ambulances were not even dispatched to Tavistock Square, scene of the bus bomb, until 52 minutes after the blast.
The ambulance service was also forced to admit that it "did not provide a complete picture" to a London Assembly inquiry in 2006 into the emergency response, giving an account which suggested a speedier and more efficient response than had actually taken place. "There was no intent to deceive," insisted an ambulance spokesman.
6. We may never know how much MI5 knew before July 7
One of the most dramatic images to emerge from the inquests was not an image of a bomb scene, but a grainy, black-and-white surveillance photograph of Aldgate bomber Tanweer, which MI5 sent to US secret services in the months before the attacks to be shown to a key al-Qaida informant. The informant, Mohammed Junaid Babar, had not identified the image as being significant, it emerged in evidence – perhaps unsurprisingly since the original, which very clearly showed the bomber with Mohammed Sidique Khan, had been cropped so badly as to render Tanweer unrecognisable and cut out Khan altogether. Babar had been involved in training Khan in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan.
MI5 had no explanation for the poor quality of the image. "One of my children," tartly noted inquest counsel Hugo Keith, "could have done a better job."
Witness G, the security service spokesman giving evidence anonymously, acknowledged in court that MI5 had allowed a committee of MPs to be misled over its classification of suspects, and had not told the MPs about the original, good-quality picture.
But if the spokesman, under cross-examination, did shed some light on MI5's involvement, to many of the bereaved families his evidence was distinguished more by what it did not reveal. It was known before the inquest, for example, that Khan came onto MI5's radar on at least eight occasions before the bombings, dating back as early as 2001. The witness cited limited resources, unsophisticated computer systems, even Khan's common name, as explanations of why the dots had not been joined. Repeatedly, he said the service had improved its systems since the attacks and would be unlikely to miss such connections again. But he did not elaborate how and why.
At one point, almost as an aside, Witness G told the court that he was confident Khan could have been identified as a trained jihadist in March 2005, four months before the bombings, had agents chosen to investigate a major lead. They did not, he said, for a "proportionate and reasonable" reason. However, he was unable to disclose what that was, he said, "for national security reasons".
7. Inquests have their limits
After a process of more than six months, during which more than 300 people have given evidence in person and a futher 200 by statement, 1,173 pieces of evidence have been disclosed and at least 16 separate legal teams have had their say, all involved will hope that the coroner will have made significant strides towards uncovering the full story of 7 July.
But however admirable, in the minds of many bereaved families, Lady Justice Hallett's management of the inquest process has been, questions are certain to remain even after she delivers her verdicts. Legal rules tightly circumscribe the powers of coroners, whose principal role, of course, is to rule on cause of death. It is not yet absolutely certain how much scope she will consider she has under "rule 43" to make recommendations to prevent further deaths.
Some of the bereaved families believe that the end of the inquest should represent the close of the period of inquiry. But others have pressing questions that they insist still have to be answered. A number of family members feel that the security services were allowed to sidestep important questions during the inquest process, and that the witness who gave evidence on MI5's behalf was not pushed by the coroner or her barrister to give full answers.
Some relatives question Witness G's assertion that the failure to follow up intelligence about the 7 July bombers was due to limited resources, or question why Babar, who remains the only person to be convicted in relation to the bombings, served only four years in a US prison before being released.
Some years ago lawyers representing survivors and the bereaved families launched legal action to force the government to hold an independent inquiry into the attacks. Those proceedings were stayed while the inquest process was ongoing; they could be reactivated, dependent on the coroner's findings and potential recommendations. It may not be over yet.
