Conspiracy fever: As rumours swell that the government staged 7/7,
victims' relatives call for a proper inquiry

By Sue Reid Last updated at 11:53 PM on 03rd July 2009

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Today almost four years on, the images of that dreadful morning are
etched into our minds: the woman in the haunting white burns mask
being helped to safety; the shell-shocked businessman in a suit
with his hair and shirt matted with blood; the crippled No 30 bus
with its roof blown off; the mangled wreckage of smouldering Tube
trains.

The country's worst-ever terrorist atrocity during London's morning
rush hour on July 7, 2005, shattered for ever the heady euphoria
in which the capital was basking the morning after winning the bid
for the 2012 Olympics.

That afternoon, Tony Blair - who was hosting the G8 summit on global
poverty in Gleneagles, Scotland - returned to Downing Street to
pronounce that the attack was an act in the 'name of Islam'.

Fateful day: The iconic image of a 7/7 Tube victim wearing a burns
mask

Later, at a meeting of the Government's national emergency committee
COBRA, London's anti-terror police chief Andy Hayman told senior
ministers that he suspected suicide bombers.

And so the story of 7/7 that we have come to accept was pieced
together: four British Muslims - Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad
Tanweer, 22, Jermaine Lindsay, 19, and Hasib Hussain, 18 - blew
themselves up using home-made explosives, killing 56 and injuring
700 on three Tube trains and a double-decker bus.

They had travelled on a mainline train from Luton into King's Cross
Thameslink Station in London, each carrying a heavy rucksack of
explosives.

It is a version of events that has been 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 insisted 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, where all four had family and friends.

It concluded that the Muslim bombers were not controlled by a
terrorist mastermind, but inspired by Al Qaeda ideology picked up
on extremist websites.

But families of the dead victims and an increasing number of 7/7
survivors claim there are inconsistencies and basic mistakes in the
official accounts that need explanation.

And they are demanding a full public inquiry to answer key questions
about what the Intelligence Services and the police did and did not
know before the bombings.

Meanwhile, the Government's determined refusal to meet their demands
is having a very dangerous side-effect - fuelling myriad conspiracy
theories about 7/7.

Books, blogs and several video documentaries point to oddities in
the official accounts.

Messages left for the victims of the London bombings at the site
of the bus explosion in Tavistock Square

Alarmingly, some of the conspiracy videos are being hawked around
mosques throughout the country to whip up anti-British sentiment.

For the most outlandish and offensive of them suggest that the
attacks were not the work of Muslim terrorists at all, but were
carried out by the Government to boost support for the Iraq war.

The survivors are so intent on an independent inquiry that they are
now taking legal action in the High Court to try to force the Home
Secretary Alan Johnson to authorise 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.'

Rachel North, a 39-year-old strategy director who survived the
King's Cross Tube bombing, adds: 'We need a public inquiry. It was
the public, after all, not the politicians, who were attacked. Let
the public know what risks they run and tell them why there are
those living among them who seek to kill for an ideal.'

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.

Tavistock bombing: The remains of the bus after the terrorist attack

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 - but only after
the error was raised by survivors - 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 throws up 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.

According to the July Seventh Truth Campaign - another group calling
for a public inquiry - this again places the official version of
the bombers' travelling times in doubt.

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.
Controversially, no CCTV images, either still or moving, of them
in London have ever been released.

The Luton image is also contentious: the quality is poor and the
faces of three of the bombers are unidentifiable. The conspiracy
theorists say it could be a fake.

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.

Blown up: A Circle Line train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate
stations

The Truth Campaign group is equally sceptical about the bombers'
supposed arrival time at King's Cross.

They say it takes seven minutes to walk from the Thameslink line
station to the main King's Cross station, where there is an entrance
to the Tube network.

Police say the four men were seen on the main King's Cross concourse
at 8.26am, although no CCTV footage has ever been made public.

But is this possible? How had the men got there in three short
minutes after getting off the Luton train at 8.23am?

And it is such inconsistencies that are fuelling the deepening
concerns. This week, a television documentary on BBC2 called
Conspiracy Files 7/7 revealed the existence of a conspiracy theorist's
56-minute video called Ripple Effect.

It accuses Tony Blair, the Government, the police, and the British
and Israeli Secret Services of murdering the innocent people who
died that day to stir up anti-Islamic fervour and create public
support for the 'war on terror'.

Fact or fiction? Some theories suggest Mohammad Sidique Khan's video
was a forgery

It alleges that the four British Muslims were tricked by the
authorities into taking part in what they were told would be a mock
anti-terror training exercise. What they weren't told, the video
alleges, was that the Government was going to blow them up, along
with other passengers, then pretend the four were suicide bombers.

Without any evidence, the Ripple Effect video accuses government
agents of setting off pre-planted explosives under the three Tube
trains and on the bus.

It suggests that the four Muslims were not, in fact, on any of the
Tube trains, claiming that they missed them altogether because of
the train delays on the Luton to London line.

It adds, astonishingly, that because the four did not get onto the
Tube on time, three of them were murdered by police at Canary Wharf
later that morning and the fourth - the bus bomber - ran off.

Outrageous though these claims are, the video has become an internet
hit. More worryingly, it is playing on the fears of Britain's Muslim
community.

Even some senior Islamists believe the events of 7/7 were fabricated.
As Dr Mohammad Naseem, the chairman of Birmingham's Central Mosque,
says in the BBC2 documentary: 'We do not accept the government
version of July 7, 2005. The Ripple Effect video is more convincing
than the official statements.'

Mr Naseem, a well-educated man, had made 2,000 copies of Ripple
Effect for members of his mosque. Research has revealed that even
before the contentious video came out, one in four British Muslims
thought the Government or the Secret Services were responsible for
the 7/7 atrocities. Now the number of doubters is growing.

At Friday prayers recently, Dr Naseem asked the congregation to
raise their hands if they did not accept the government version of
events. Nearly the entire gathering of 150 men and boys did so. He
then urged his audience to collect free copies of Ripple Effect at
the back of the mosque.

A victim is taken away from King's Cross station by emergency
personnel

The respected chairman has since said that the identities of the
bombers were discovered by the police 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?'

That is another suggestion in Ripple Effect. So who is behind this
dangerous video?

He is 60-year-old Yorkshireman Anthony John Hill who lives in Kells,
County Meath, Ireland. He is currently under arrest there and
fighting extradition to Britain. Police here want to interview him
on a charge of perverting the course of justice after he sent a
copy of his video to a jury member in a terrorist case.

Mr Hill made Ripple Effect at his own home and is the narrator.

In many ways, it is an amateurish affair: the dialogue is jumbled
and hard to understand. But that begs the question, why is Ripple
Effect having such an impact?

The answer is that muddled in with the wild theories of a government
plot are some questions that are hard to ignore.

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?

Some sources say the Government planned the attack

By the most extraordinary coincidence - Ripple Effect says it is a
billion-to-one chance - there was a mock terrorist exercise going
on in London that day. This was revealed by the organiser and former
Scotland Yard officer Peter Power on BBC Radio 5 in the early evening
after the atrocity.

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.'

And what of the menacing suicide videos that Khan and Tanweer made
before the bombings, which were released on the internet after the
attacks? The Ripple Effect video has an answer for this, too.

Mr Hill explains on it: 'The oldest would be asked to make a "suicide
video"

prior to the mock training exercise in order to make it as realistic
as possible... the second oldest would also be asked to make a
similar video, as a back-up, just in case anything went wrong or
the oldest pulled out of the exercise before the date.'

Fact or fiction, it does not matter. The impact of the video is
swaying Muslim feeling. The BBC2 documentary shows worshippers in
the Birmingham mosque commenting on 7/7 after seeing Ripple Effect.
One elderly man states: 'There can be little doubt that the Government
did this themselves to these four young men.'

Another adds: 'We have been deceived by the British authorities,
and Muslims have been framed for these attacks. They are lying from
A to Z.'

Few are more concerned than Rachel North, the King's Cross Tube
bomb survivor, about Ripple Effect and the discontent it is stirring
up: 'If people in mosques think the Government is so antagonistic
towards them, that they're actually willing to frame them for a
monstrous crime they didn't commit, what does that do to levels of
trust? That is a problem for everybody in this country.'

She says the video's central tenet - that 7/7 was faked to demonise
Muslims and sway public opinion in favour of the 'war on terror' -
is like throwing petrol on a fire.

Like her, many responsible people - and they include former Scotland
Yard deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick, former anti-terror
chief of London police Andy Hayman (who oversaw the police response
to 7/7) and David Davis, until recently Tory Shadow Home Secretary
- now support the call for an independent investigation into the
bombings.

Paddick himself said this week, the torrent of rumours about 7/7
was harming relations between Muslims and the rest of Britain:
'Hopefully there will be people in the police service, the security
service and Whitehall who will realise how important it is that
every attempt is made to counteract these conspiracy theories.'

As the fourth anniversary of the London bombings approaches next
Tuesday, they are words the Government would be wise to heed.