[helicopter blades whirring]
[menacing music plays]
[Doug] When the car was discovered,
the bomb disposal officer was dispatched to the scene.
[menacing music continues]
We found a number of small, homemade, explosive devices.
Homemade explosives can be exceptionally volatile.
Police officers evacuated Luton railway station.
They've had to move the material bit by bit into a sandbagged area
where they can detonate it.
[explosion]
[Doug] It showed just how organized, sophisticated, coordinated,
and dangerous the threat was.
[shutter clicks]
Why would you leave explosives in a car unless it was for future use?
The attackers on 7/7 had died at the scene. That much was clear.
But we had to investigate, not only who was involved in the actual attack
and where they'd come from…
[reporter] A huge investigation.
Even the smallest piece of evidence could prove crucial.
But also we had to be worried that there might be a wider network.
[pulsing music plays]
Who else knew about it? Who had supported them?
Who had financed them? Who had encouraged them?
Were there people associated with them
who were going to come and launch a second wave of attacks? We didn't know.
[angelic singing]
[Pete] The days just rolled into one. We were just exhausted.
We're looking for evidence in relation to the identity of the bombers.
And that evidence is gonna come from the device itself or from them.
Did they have a mobile phone, or a train ticket? Wallets? Cards?
And of course, in an explosion,
that stuff can get thrown literally hundreds of meters away.
There was so much within that carriage.
Everything was documented,
photographing anything that was significant.
[shutter clicks]
Identification cards, bank cards, jewelry, handbags,
mobile phones, clothing.
We compiled lists of the passengers from each bomb site
and sent them to MI5 and police forces across the country
to see if any of the names raised suspicions.
[haunting music plays]
[John] I was the counter-terrorism senior investigating officer for West Yorkshire.
I'd been responsible for leading some pretty high-profile cases,
but this was the largest criminal investigation
there'd ever been in the United Kingdom.
There was lots of rapid information flow from London
up to the investigation incident room in Yorkshire.
Lists of multiple names.
People who tragically had been caught up in these events.
It quickly dawned on us the enormity of the task,
and the size and scale that this inquiry was gonna take.
I remember going through the lists and seeing that we'd got three people
from West Yorkshire,
from around the same neighborhood, around Beeston, on the outskirts of Leeds.
At first, we thought it could've just been three young people travelling together,
and unfortunately got caught up in something.
But then we realized that there was something more significant
about those individuals.
Their identity documents…
[shutter clicks]
…were found at three different bomb scenes.
[shutter clicks]
What's the likelihood of three people, who were at three different bomb sites,
coming from the same small neighborhood,
two hundred and odd miles away from where the events have taken place?
But still, it could, of course, have been a coincidence.
And we didn't know whether they were dead, alive, walking wounded.
But then we discovered one of them, Hasib Hussain,
had been reported missing by his family.
A very skilled and trusted officer went to go and visit them.
Hasib's information was found at the Tavistock Square bus attack.
Was Hasib potentially a victim? Or was he connected to the attacks?
When I met Mr. Hussain, Hasib's father, and Hasib's older brother, Imran,
they were, obviously, both extremely worried about him.
They'd been ringing and ringing his mobile number, no response.
Mr. Hussain was a very nice man,
and I could tell he was a very loving father.
He was very keen to point out that Hasib said his prayers,
he prayed five times a day,
he was going to college, not going out at night.
He was not taking drugs, not going out with girls.
He was not drinking alcohol. He was absolutely the perfect son.
But Mr. Hussain didn't know any reason why his son would go to London.
And he didn't know who he'd gone with,
where he was going, what he was doing there.
Didn't know when he was coming back.
And I thought, "If he's such a well-behaved, loyal son,
why has he not told them about where he's going, what he's doing?"
During our conversations,
I was aware that Imran, Hasib's brother, didn't speak.
That was bothering me.
Just as we were leaving, I slipped him my telephone number
and just said to him quietly,
"Give me a ring if there's anything you want to talk about."
[delicate piano music plays]
[John] Cate rang me.
She had this slightly niggling feeling.
Was Cate's antenna correct? Was there something else?
If so, what was that? At the same time, there was so much going on.
We were constantly running lots of lines of inquiries.
This was just one aspect of everything else happening at the time.
[intense music plays]
[reporter] Amidst the grief, one of the most vigorous
and intensive manhunts
the UK has ever seen.
Forensic experts are still trying to establish
exactly what type of explosives were used by the bombers.
[intense music continues]
[Cliff] We were under pressure from the police to try and find out
what type of device was it, how was it set off.
So you sift through all the debris from that scene for traces of explosives,
because the type of explosive does give the police clues to who the bombers are.
[mysterious music plays]
In essence, we were looking for the components of a bomb.
Vanishingly small traces.
But we were coming up complete blank.
Absolutely no traces of any of the normal high explosives that we'd expect to find.
This way of making bombs was entirely new.
This was the first time in my experience
that I'd ever come across anything like this,
and that was a big concern for us.
[phone rings]
[Cate] That evening, I got a phone call.
[ringing continues]
I didn't recognize the number, but it turned out to be Imran,
Hasib's brother.
And he told me that he had been in his brother's bedroom,
and he'd found a phone that he didn't know his brother had.
There was only one telephone number on it.
[line rings]
He rang that number…
and it turned out to be a gentleman who had rented a property to his brother…
18 Alexandra Grove.
But why would this 18-year-old lad, who lived in the house with his parents,
be renting a house?
All he said to me is, "You need to get yourself round there quick."
[John] 18 Alexandra Grove was put under observation.
Very quickly, there were reports coming back from the officers
to say there were concerns.
The bushes had got wilted leaves,
and clearly, had been subject to some kind of toxic chemicals.
That was a huge worry and a concern.
[foreboding music plays]
[Cliff] I got a phone call.
There was a possible crime scene up in Leeds,
and could somebody go?
We didn't know what we'd find.
Could there be explosives in there? That was my number-one concern.
We don't go in through an obvious entrance like a doorway,
in case it's booby-trapped.
[approaching footsteps]
[tense music plays]
Once we got inside…
it was a complete and utter mess.
Lots of trays, lots of filter papers, as you'd find in a lab.
Lots of white powder residues.
That's a scary thing.
If that's the detonator material, then friction,
just rubbing it between two surfaces, or dropping it,
any of those things will make it detonate.
[tense music continues]
There were hot plates.
Lots of aluminum pans.
A number of bottles labelled hydrogen peroxide.
There was buckets of brown sludge.
I actually don't have a sense of smell.
Never have had, born without one.
But people were telling me this brown stuff stank of shit.
But if that's really shit, there are no flies.
Not one.
- [beeps] - [shutter clicks]
I thought this dark brown stuff
was actually some kind of high-explosive mixture.
And it was all over the place.
- [beeping] - [shutter clicking]
Never seen anything like that.
[menacing, pulsing music plays]
[John] It's clearly where they constructed the devices.
It's where they'd met regularly.
The team were gathering more and more forensic leads.
Things like telephone SIM cards, biometrics, including DNA, fingerprints,
all connected to the three individuals on that list.
The forensic team also discovered a number of links to the fourth bomber,
whose documents had been found at the site of the Russell Square attack.
We'd now got a breakthrough.
We were able to now confirm
that Mohammad Sidique Khan,
Shehzad Tanweer…
- [beep] - [shutter clicks]
…Hasib Hussain,
and Jermaine Lindsay
had been responsible for these atrocities.
- [beep] - [shutter clicks]
They were the four that built the bombs, that took them down to London,
that detonated them, killing 52 innocent people.
[shutter clicks]
The prime minister said he was shocked to learn
that the bombers were homegrown terrorists born and raised in the UK.
[female reporter 1] This is the face of one of the four London bombers,
Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30 years old, a father himself.
[female reporter 2] Shehzad Tanweer, the 22-year-old responsible
for the Aldgate blast.
[female reporter 3] British of Jamaican origin,
Jermaine Lindsay, father of one.
[male reporter] This is Hasib Hussain. He was 18 years old.
He blew himself up on the number 30 bus at Tavistock Square.
[Blair] We realized it was done by people who were British,
people who'd been brought up in Britain,
who'd frankly enjoyed all the advantages of being British,
um, and all the support that the British society
and state gives people.
Obviously, what that showed you was
that there were people within our own society
who wanted to cause deep, profound harm to our country.
[grim music plays]
[anchor] Good evening from Leeds, a city united in shock.
Now, the people of Leeds have to face up to the fact that
the suspected bombers come from their city.
This was a different kind of threat than we'd ever experienced before.
The people that had committed these atrocities
came from within our own communities, on our own doorstep.
It was unprecedented.
Could you all move out of line of sight of this road.
You'll have to go back. I'm sorry.
We were continually knocking on doors in and around Beeston.
Were there were more people involved?
Had this been part of a network of other terrorists?
Was there going to be another attack?
[journalist] When I arrived to cover the story,
there was police everywhere,
and there must've been over a hundred journalists.
You'd be falling over each other because Beeston is quite small. [chuckles]
It's only a couple of miles.
The people I spoke to, they were just deeply shocked.
These men, from their community, were responsible for killing 52 people.
They'd seen them as nice men, you know.
Mohammad Sidique Khan worked as a teaching assistant
in a local school there.
It can't be Mr. Khan. They must've got it wrong.
Somebody's got it wrong somewhere.
Hasib Hussain, he was the golden boy of the family.
Shehzad Tanweer had spent a couple of years
at university studying sports sciences.
He was always playing around like that. He was a clever boy, they say.
[Nasreen] We found two young boys.
They were like, "Only a few days ago,
we were playing cricket with Shehzad Tanweer."
Hang around with him for half an hour, you'd be his friend.
[Nasreen] The fourth man was Jermaine Lindsay.
He was a convert to Islam and grew up nearby in Huddersfield.
There's people that do these kind of acts
which are completely contrary to the teachings of Islam.
I remember their faces, and they were so pale,
like the blood had drained from them
because they just couldn't quite cope with the news.
This street has been cordoned off since first thing this morning.
[Nasreen] There was a real, palpable sense of fear
amongst the community in that area.
They felt the authorities were treating all of them like potential suspects.
Harassing everybody. It's harassment more than anything else.
I was always getting phone calls saying, "This house has been raided."
"This person's been arrested."
[reporter] So this is a community under siege,
and they're asking the wider community to understand
the Islam of the terrorists is not the Islam we worship.
I was thinking, "Not again."
The Muslim community couldn't go through
a moment where they were put under a microscope again.
Because we had lived in that time of 9/11,
where we had to somehow apologize
for the actions of some crazy people.
It killed me that Islam was being, you know,
somehow associated with this bloodshed.
[dramatic music playing faintly]
These guys had done the most heinous thing that any human being could do,
which was to take the lives of innocent people.
That's why we're upset, man. That people are just--
People wanna make them out to be through and through bad people,
but you don't understand they were good people.
So why have they done it? That's it, man.
[shutter clicks]
[John] To all intents and purposes,
there was nothing about them that would've given any indication
that these people were about to carry out the biggest terrorist atrocity in the UK.
[quietly menacing music plays]
But during the course of the investigation,
a plastic bag had been found
that contained a number of videos.
[indistinct chatter]
They were the videos of the bombers.
One of those videos was particularly disturbing.
It was a video of Mohammad Sidique Khan, where he was holding his young daughter.
I've not got too long to go now.
And I'm gonna really, really miss you.
But I absolutely love you to bits.
You've been the happiest thing in my life, you and your mum.
I just so much wanted to be with you,
but I have to do this thing for our future.
[John] Quite chilling.
The very fact that he knows
there's a strong likelihood he's going to be dead,
and yet his daughter should still be proud of him in the future
'cause he's fighting a cause,
is something I find impossible to kinda get your head around.
Killing 52 innocent people,
you know, it's just so difficult to try and understand.
[quietly menacing music continues]
[reporter] Police say the forensic examinations in Beeston
will continue probably for several days to come,
trying to find out who turned these men into mass murderers.
[siren whoops]
I was a part of an organization trying to bring about social action,
um, and welfare, within the Muslim community,
with young people.
Shehzad Tanweer was a teenager when I met him.
He was a decent kid from an affluent family.
His father, you know, he's a well-known business person.
One day, Shehzad invited me to the Iqra bookshop in Beeston,
and that's where I realized, um, his viewpoint, his real viewpoint.
[anxious music plays]
I was invited around the back to listen to a cassette recording
of Sheikh Faisal,
a Salafi jihadist preacher.
[Faisal] The British are the greatest enemies of Islam
and the Muslims.
When there's a jihad, you need to know who to kill.
So it's important to know who's a Muslim and who's a kafir.
[Mohammed] He said that if you see a non-Muslim walking down the street,
you're allowed to kill him, and you'll go to paradise.
It literally gave me goosebumps,
and my-- my hair on the back of my neck stood up.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
And I said, "This is nonsense."
"This does not come from legitimate Islamic text."
"Islam is a religion of peace."
And they kept on responding,
"Well, we're in a state of war."
And I'm thinking, "Look around."
"Are we really in a state of war?"
And for them,
what was going on in Iraq, um, and Afghanistan
meant that we were in a state of war.
[explosions booming]
They believed that the Americans and the British people
had authorized the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And that meant that we were-- They call it Dar al-Harb,
meaning that this is the land of war.
And because it's the land of war, um, anything is legitimate.
That really, really scared me. We got into an argument.
They started swearing.
"You don't know what you're talking about. You're an agent of the West. Traitor."
I was a heretic Muslim.
I really, really thought that someone was gonna throw a punch.
You know, I was gonna get attacked.
After the incident, Shehzad Tanweer started to distance himself from me.
I didn't know who to turn to.
Because by that moment in time,
it was just an issue of-- of people having ideas.
Never did it ever cross my mind
that they would bring war to the streets of London.
[ominous music plays]
[reporter] Detectives are still trying to figure out
what linked the men together.
Attention has been focused on this bookstore.
We know that three of the men were customers here.
Quite quickly, I think, the police's attention turned to the Iqra bookshop.
For most Muslims, this was just an ordinary bookshop,
but there were rumors
that a very small group of men had been using this place
to share their vile, extremist views.
That made sense to me
because since the 1990s,
you had extremist preachers,
men like Abu Hamza, Omar Bakri, and Sheikh Al-Faisal.
They twisted the Quran,
and more and more, exploited the sense of injustice over Western foreign policy
to radicalize a very small minority of young Muslim men
who felt that they didn't belong,
that Britain wasn't their country anymore, that it was their enemy.
If you look at some of the terrorist attacks before 7/7,
you can see that British Muslim men,
who radicalized in the UK, had been behind them.
- I mean, look at 9/11. - [sirens wailing]
One of the failed 9/11 bombers was Zacarias Moussaoui.
Where was Zacarias Moussaoui radicalized?
[playing marching song]
Where did he learn about jihad?
The same with Richard Reid, the shoe bomber.
[heavy rhythmic music plays]
Here in the UK.
So 7/7 didn't happen in a vacuum.
The policy to go to war in Iraq, I think that was the trigger,
and that's why 7/7 happened.
[journalist] You accept that the invasion of Iraq
has acted as a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda
and made Britain a greater target?
Well, they will use any issue. They will always have a reason.
[menacing music plays]
It's such a difficult argument, this,
when-- when people say, "Well, you 'caused' this terrorism."
In the end, if you're a political leader,
you can't take decisions on the basis of what a terrorist might do.
You take decisions on the basis of what you believe is right.
Now, you may end up being wrong,
and it may be that people disagree with you,
but you-- you can't have policy
governed by the reaction of people
who then go out and kill completely innocent people.
[Khan] I'm gonna talk to you in a language that you understand.
Your democratically elected governments
continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world.
Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.
We are at war, and I am a soldier.
And now you too will taste the reality of this situation.
[haunting music plays]
[Dan] They brought me out of the coma I'd been in since the explosion.
For a long time in hospital,
people tried to get me to avoid newspapers, the news, things like that,
and up to a point I had,
but I thought, "Fuck it, I wanna know what's going on in the world."
So I put BBC News on.
How did four young British men end up becoming suicide bombers
in their own country?
As I was lying there watching it, his face come up.
We will not stop this fight.
We are at war, and I am a soldier.
[Dan] I was just like, "I can't fucking believe this."
[haunting music continues]
Because as soon as I saw him, I could see him in the carriage.
It was almost as if the impact of the blast had hit me again.
That's the man that I see every night.
That's the man that follows me everywhere I go.
And I punched the telly.
My first reaction was… I hit the telly to get it away from me.
I just can't… I can't get my head around it.
I can't begin to imagine what was going through his head,
other than just nothing but vitriolic hate for every single one of us.
[calm music plays]
[reporter] In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks,
Londoners carry on as normal.
Meanwhile, the task of identifying the dead is continuing.
For the relatives of the missing,
each day brings more uncertainty and misery.
[tragic orchestral music plays]
[woman] I was 16 years old.
My mum had been missing since 7/7 had happened.
I was upstairs in my room,
and my family was watching the news.
[female anchor] Good afternoon. Victims of London's terror attacks
have been named.
[Azuma] I just remember hearing, like, all of these screams from downstairs.
They got louder and louder.
It was almost like they rose through the floorboards like smoke.
[female anchor] Gladys Wundowa, a cleaner at University College London,
was a passenger on the bus in Tavistock Square.
[male anchor] In the past hour, University College London…
My dad, he said, "Okay, we need to tell you that Mummy's not coming home."
Um…
"Mummy's passed away."
I just started screaming.
And no one could stop me. There was no consoling me at that point.
[tragic orchestral music continues]
I remember this faint smell of my mum
on this pillow as I'm, like, screaming and crying.
But it was this realization that she was not there,
and she was just not coming back.
She was gone.
At midday, one week after the terror attacks,
crowds gathered at the scenes of all four bombings
for a two-minute tribute to those killed and injured.
[Azuma] It wasn't just that, you know, I lost my mum.
I lost so much more than just my mum.
I lost my ability to believe that I could do anything.
And I didn't have that person who, no matter what happens in the world,
no matter who rejects me in the world, how many times my heart gets broken,
there's one safe place that I can go to that I belong.
Suddenly, I didn't have somewhere that I belonged anymore.
That 16-year-old died when my mum did.
[tragic orchestral music fades out]
[siren wailing]
[reporter] On the streets of London, police presence is total.
This huge investigation is far from over.
[anxious rhythmic music plays]
Although the attacks bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda-directed terrorism,
there wasn't a clear sense of the structure of the network
that had been responsible.
We didn't know who else may have been involved,
or whether there were other groups likely to carry out further attacks.
At this time, all we knew was that someone had made an effective explosive.
We tried all sorts of different tests.
But we can't make head or tail of it.
What… What is this stuff?
[eerie music plays]
As we did more and more testing,
it became clear that the idea that these four people
get together and decide they're going to make these bombs
and have them work as they did is just preposterous.
They haven't just dreamed this up themselves.
It would take a lot of training for someone to put these devices together.
They must've had help, and expertise, and advice.
[eerie music continues]
[reporter] We have entered a chilling new era
in the terrorist history of this country.
These were young British citizens
willing to die to cause maximum death and destruction.
They were not on the radar of the security forces.
[disturbing music plays]
[Richard] I was an investigative reporter
interested in extreme Islamist networks in the UK.
In the days after 7/7, all the information I was getting
was that the bombers were not known to intelligence or police.
[typing]
That was totally untrue.
I was speaking to a confidential source,
and he said to me,
when MI5 plugged the bombers into their database,
two of them, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer,
had been on MI5's radar a year before the attacks.
[shutter clicks]
In 2004, they were both photographed and featured in surveillance
on a number of occasions with Omar Khyam,
an active British terrorist linked to al-Qaeda,
who was planning a mass-casualty bomb attack
targeting nightclubs, bars, and shopping centers.
That plan was foiled.
But even though both Mohammad Sidique Khan
and Shehzad Tanweer
featured in the surveillance of a UK terrorist plot,
MI5 failed to keep an eye on them.
[rhythmic music plays]
Whenever you have a plot like that,
which ended in arrests,
you go back and check, as it were,
the peripheries and all the other contacts.
[shutter clicks]
The leader of that plot had 4,000 telephone contacts.
[shutter clicks]
We prioritized the top dozen,
but Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan were not among those people.
Our belief at the time was that they were not part of it.
In fact, our conviction was that they were not part of it.
[shutter clicks]
[Richard] Essentially, MI5 let two of the 7/7 bombing team
slip through the net.
This was a major intelligence failure.
[rhythmic music continues]
Unfortunately, we have to prioritize the people
who look as though they are most concerning.
This is an uncomfortable exercise,
but no organization in the world has the resources to do everything.
My colleagues and I regret being unable to stop it,
but I don't believe,
even being self-critical, that we could have done.
That was the view of those who externally judged our performance.
[rhythmic music continues]
If MI5 had made Mohammad Sidique Khan
and Shehzad Tanweer priority-one target for surveillance,
they'd have seen that they went out to Pakistan
to train for jihad
in November 2004.
[rhythmic music continues]
In fact, Mohammad Sidique Khan went out to train on at least three occasions.
He got weapons training,
bomb-making skills.
He also met an al-Qaeda senior figure
who convinced him to go back to the UK and attack Britain.
Thousands of British citizens like him had passed through these camps.
Many of those people came back to the UK, but now they were militarized.
And then, back in the UK, they just simply disappeared.
[rhythmic music intensifies]
If one bombing team has already slipped through the net…
how many others might there be out there that they've missed?
[rhythmic music crescendoes]
[pulsing music plays]
[time ticking]
[Cliff] We tried all sorts of different tests
to work out what this stuff was.
Finally, one of the tests gave us a result for a material called piperine,
a component in black peppercorns.
It turns out the bombs were made with ground black pepper
and hydrogen peroxide,
which you can get from hair bleach.
Clearly, you can buy those anywhere.
This is now very, very scary.
What you've got is very easily obtainable materials
to make reliable high explosives,
and the security services would have no clue.
[time ticking]
[Pete] Two weeks after the bombings, work down in the tunnel had finished.
All the victims had been removed.
We just held a very short service.
We read out the names of each of those victims who had been killed.
And, um, I remember I just had the feeling…
[ticking]
This wasn't over.
[ticking continues]
[music crescendoes, ends]
[ticking stops]
[high-pitched tone whines]
- [yells] - [disorienting sting]
[reporter 1] We're getting reports of a series of incidents.
[reporter 2] Still pretty unclear what's happened.
It's happening all over London.
[reporter 3] London is attacked once again.
[theme music plays]