Is the UK really any safer 20 years on from 7/7? | UK News

There are extraordinary secret surveillance images – now largely forgotten – that in their own grainy and mysterious way, tell the story of missed opportunities that maybe, just maybe, could have stopped the horrific suicide attacks that took place in London 20 years ago.

They are images of the ringleader of the 7/7 bombings – first caught on camera at an al-Qaeda-associated training camp in the Lake District in 2001.

Two more images from 2004 show him – name and intentions then unknown – meeting a different cell of bomb plotters outside London and being followed by an MI5 team as he made his way back to Leeds.

Nobody joined all these dots, and worked out the man was Mohammad Sidique Khan until he and the three other members of his gang had killed 52 people with their four homemade bombs.

Despite being seen meeting other men of real concern, he was never made a priority for investigation.

For months I have been asking many of the top people – from prime ministers through to former extremists – to reflect on what they have learned over the 20 years since 7/7. Sir Tony Blair was prime minister on 7/7. Hindsight, he told me, was a wonderful thing.

I’ve found that the British state has, arguably, the most evolved and sophisticated suite of powers and tools possible to identify, disrupt, prosecute, ban and jail people for terrorism offences.

But at the same time the threats that those powers are being used to counter today are so much more complex than they were in 2005. And so, 20 years since 7/7, are we any safer now than we were then?

The 7/7 attacks were the worst wake-up call imaginable for the UK’s then outdated counter-terrorism operations.

Until that day in 2005, the UK’s response to terrorism groups was heavily influenced by the experience of combating the IRA, which organised itself along military lines.

Al-Qaeda (AQ) was also broadly organised in a military way – directing its adherents, including the 7/7 bombers. But the key lesson from 7/7 was that this analogy only went so far.

MI5 and the police realised they had to work closer together to penetrate AQ’s cells.

MI5 teams were the experts in secretly gathering intelligence. They could bug, burgle and listen to “subjects of interest”, to use the jargon. But in the run-up to 7/7, the agency often fell short of sharing that information widely and quickly enough.

Peter Clarke was the Metropolitan Police officer in charge of counter-terrorism policing at the time of 7/7.

“I haven’t spoken to anybody who was involved in either counter-terrorism or in the intelligence agencies, who don’t regard it as a failure,” he told me. “Of course it was.”

The failure was complex. Lord Jonathan Evans, the former head of MI5 – and at the time of 7/7, the deputy head – highlights the pressure intelligence teams were under.

“You have to make choices in counter-terrorism investigations. You can’t investigate everything, so the question is are you investigating the most immediately threatening intelligence and making the right priority calls?”

The reason why the future 7/7 ringleader was put to one side in 2004 was that there was no substantial intelligence that he was actually planning an attack.

The agencies were focusing on a huge bomb plot they knew about – Operation Crevice. It was run by the men Khan was seen meeting. But the brutal fact was that they had no idea that Khan could be a serious threat because he had been discounted as a priority for further investigation.

The 2005 attacks forced the agency and police to think deeply about how they could end a doom loop of not investigating someone because they had decided they didn’t know enough to think they were worth investigating.

Some of that was about funding – and there was a huge injection into counter-terrorism in the years that followed.

But more importantly MI5, alongside their partners in the police, began to develop a better “triage” system to work out which of the thousands of potential plotters they had titbits of intelligence about needed to be prioritised.

That helped get the police closer, more quickly, to the point where they could seize evidence to land someone in jail.

Nowhere was this more successful than in Operation Overt, which came a year after 7/7. The Overt plotters had an al-Qaeda recipe for a liquid bomb disguised as a soft drink – and they planned to blow up transatlantic planes.

MI5 captured in extraordinary detail the gang’s preparations. They saw the men working with tools to make strange-looking devices from household items including drink bottles and camera flash circuits.

Nobody was sure what they were up to – until the surveillance revealed the men recording “martyrdom” videos envisaging their own deaths mid-air.

This time, the intelligence was being shared in almost real-time – and the police and prosecutors dived in and arrested and charged the gang before the devices were finally ready. The success of Operation Overt shows that plots could be disrupted early.

Lord Evans points to another critical shift in thinking. “We had always been predominantly, not exclusively, a London-based organisation,” he says. “But when you recognise that the 7/7 bombers came down from Yorkshire, the threat was national.

“We needed to have an effective regional network working very closely with the police in the major cities and that was accelerated and was a very successful way of ensuring that we were able to find out what was happening in Manchester or Birmingham or wherever as effectively as we had traditionally done in London.”

Then, in 2006, Parliament created a new offence of preparing for acts of terrorism.

This meant the police could swoop in even earlier than in the case of Operation Overt – even before an attacker’s plan was settled. All they needed now was to show a court that an individual had a terrorism mindset and was taking steps towards an outrage – such as researching targets, even if their plan was not finalised.

Max Hill KC led some of the UK’s most complex terrorism trials – and went on to be the Director of Public Prosecutions between 2018 and 2023. He always wanted the strongest case to put to a jury and judge – in order to get the longest possible sentence to protect the public. But in the case of a bomb-maker, that presented a dilemma for the police and MI5.

“How long to let a person run towards their ultimate aim of deploying devices?” he says. “The longer you leave it, the more serious the jail sentence. But the longer you wait, the greater the risk that there will be damage or harm.”

Success after success followed – and cells of plotters were also increasingly infiltrated by spooks finding secret ways to capture chats about plans. Until, that is, the rise of the self-styled Islamic State, which changed all of that once again.

By 2014, thousands of young radicalised men and women had flocked to the territory the group had seized in Syria and Iraq, convinced that the ultra-violent movement was building a utopian state.

Its ideologues told some followers, who could not travel, to plan their own attacks at home and without any direction from commanders.

This was a new and terrifying prospect – and led to a wave of DIY attacks across Europe, including in the UK. So the government turned to other tools to “disrupt” extremists coming home from abroad, by cancelling their passports or stripping citizenship.

The first of a number of attacks in 2017 was committed by a killer who drove into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before stabbing to death a police officer at the gates of Parliament. He acted without warning and seemingly alone, rapidly self-radicalising – moving from thought to violence before his intentions became clear to anyone else.

The rapidity of these attacks – and the regularity of them, disrupted or acted out, had an extraordinary consequence that further complicated the picture. Far-right extremists watched and learned and, seeking a form of “revenge”, became determined to respond in kind.

In 2015, a 25-year-old member of National Action, a now banned extreme right-wing group, carried out a racist attack on a Sikh-heritage dentist in a supermarket. The attacker acted alone. The man who murdered Jo Cox MP a year later, during the Brexit referendum, planned and acted in a similar manner.

This DIY rapid violence did not rely on personal connections to puppet-masters. It was increasingly linked to how extremists found and absorbed extremist material all over the internet.

But that also presented an opportunity. The security service and partners – including the FBI – created teams of “online role-players”. They would pose as extremist recruiters in vile chat groups to identify would-be attackers and befriend them. It began to work.

One early success in 2017 saw a young man, angry at the death of his uncle who had been fighting in Syria, ask these spies for a bomb to attack Downing Street. It was a crazy and unrealisable plan. But he genuinely wanted to do it.

The Prevent system – which was set up to identify potential extremists and to stop them supporting terrorism – struggled to win public support amid fears that it was a network to spy on people.

But today it is a vital tool in the state’s armoury – with figures showing that since 2015, some 5,000 young people have been identified as being at risk of extremism and given support, typically through counselling and mentoring, to reject it.

The Manchester Arena terror attack of 2017 – in which 22 people were killed – revealed that MI5 missed a significant chance to focus on the would-be suicide bomber and stop him – but it also revealed how lax security at public gatherings could be exploited.

Figen Murray’s son Martyn Hett was one of the 22 killed.

“You don’t ever come to terms with it,” she tells me. “It’s the brutality, the randomness. These people who commit terrorist attacks do not care who they kill. They don’t select people in most cases.

“Our loved ones are pawns in a big game, because terrorists really want to make a statement against the state.”

Her grief spurred her on to come up with one of the biggest legal changes of the last 20 years – a practical measure to protect people if the security services fail to spot an incoming threat.

Along with Nick Aldworth, a former senior police officer, they lobbied government to create “Martyn’s Law”.

The legislation – which is coming into force over two years – requires venues to have a security plan to help stop acts of terrorism on their premises.

In time, sites with more than 800 people will need extra measures such as CCTV or security staff and all venues that can hold more than 200 people will have to devise some kind of plan to protect the public and make sure their staff know how to act on it in an emergency.

At the O2 Arena in London, for example, staff process arriving guests a bit like they are going through an airport. There are machines available to scan for weapons too.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicky Evans, the current head of counter-terrorism policing, says her officers are seeing suspects getting younger, with violent material on the internet playing a role in that.

In some cases officers are trying to work out what to do about people bent on extreme violence, inspired by acts of terrorism, but who have no clear-cut ideology.

Many of these complex cases are referred by the police to the Prevent counter-radicalisation programme to see if specialist mentors can help.

The case of the Southport murderer Alex Rudakubana – who had been repeatedly flagged to Prevent – is at the heart of a debate about internet-fuelled violence. The forthcoming public inquiry will look for answers, and may even mean we have to rethink what we mean by the word “terrorism”.

The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s recent decision to ban Palestine Action under terrorism laws – for causing massive criminal damage – is further adding to a national debate about what threats the counter-terrorism network should confront.

Today, many many more powers are in place – and the UK’s counter-terrorism network, which has a dedicated secret headquarters in London, is a well-oiled machine. But the threat is more diverse than ever.

Since 2017, the police say there have been 15 domestic terrorism incidents and they have disrupted 43 “late-stage” plots.

In the wake of the 2005 attacks, Sir Tony Blair was accused of trampling over civil liberties in the search for the right set of powers he thought the security services needed.

I asked whether he had got the balance right – and the posed back at me will be in the mind of every one of his successors.

“The most fundamental basic liberty is to be protected from violence – and particularly random terrorist violence,” he said.

“You’ve got to ask yourself, are the policy tools we have in our toolbox adequate to deal with the threat?”

Additional Reporting: Jonathan Brunert

Top image credits: AFP via Getty and Justin Talli

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