7/7 bombings: How the tragic events of July 2005 changed UK counter-terrorism forever

It is a date seared into the collective memories of all over a certain age. That morning on July 7, 2005, just before 9am, suicide bombers detonated devices on three Tube trains in central London. An hour later, a fourth device ripped through a number 30 bus near Euston station. The so-called “7/7 bombings” killed 52 people and injured over 700.

Following these attacks, the police launched the most extensive criminal investigation in British history. It’s easy to forget that, two weeks later, another terror cell launched a copycat attack, detonating bombs on three tube trains and a number 26 bus in Hackney.

Happily, in each case, the detonators failed to set off the main explosives so no one was injured. But the escape of the suspects gave the security services a unique new challenge – four failed suicide bombers running amok on the streets of London.

The usually stoic capital lurched into a state of panic. After all, these suspects had already passed the psychological point of trying to kill themselves. Ultimately, this sense of panic resulted in the infamous police shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station on the morning after the failed attacks.

The manhunt for the would-be 21/7 bombers memorably culminated eight days later when, captured on live TV, armed officers seized the last two suspects in just their pants.

These truly were three weeks like no other. Amid the chaos, the Provisional IRA announced the end of its armed campaign. Having endured three decades of their bombings, we were now bracing ourselves for a “new normal” of al-Qaeda suicide attacks.

Three pillars of state – the police, the security services and the government – faced serious questions about their performances during July 2005, and over the months and years preceding them.

The public demanded answers to two basic questions: Why didn’t the authorities see it coming and prevent it? And how did the authorities plan to ensure it wouldn’t happen again?

The perhaps surprising answer to the first question is that the authorities did see it coming. Peter Clarke – the urbane, cricket-loving former head of Counter Terror – says that, after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, British security services knew it was “a matter of when, not if” al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists would strike the UK.

Just the weekend before 7/7, the key agencies responsible for dealing with the fallout of such an attack – including the emergency services, the NHS, Transport for London – held their latest threat rehearsal exercise at Scotland Yard.

Chillingly, the imagined scenario had been bomb attacks on three central London Underground stations, a coincidence that later proved catnip to a growing band of 7/7 conspiracy theorists.

What most of us didn’t know in July 2005 was that the UK counter-terror agencies had already prevented at least two home-grown al-Qaeda mass-casualty plots – dubbed “spectaculars” – targeting innocent Britons.

In 2004, Operation Rhyme disrupted an evolving plot to plant cars loaded with explosives at underground car parks in London. This plan wasn’t a fantasy. Ringleader Dhiren Barot from Kingsbury, north west London had his elaborate plot signed off by al-Qaeda chiefs in Pakistan.

Also in 2004, Operation Crevice thwarted a terror group from Crawley near Gatwick, planning to blow up London’s Ministry of Sound nightclub and the Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent. Again, this cell meant business; they’d stored the fertiliser to be used in their devices in a west London lock-up and flown in a known bomb-maker to provide instruction.

Understandably, both police chiefs and the government wanted the British public to be aware of the very real and evolving threat of home-grown terror in their midst. However, they were unable to reveal details of the Crevice or Rhyme plots because of the UK’s sub judice laws.

The public wouldn’t find out about these murderous schemes until 2007, when the suspects came to trial. So, in the run-up to 7/7, politicians and police could only broadly warn the public that the terror threat to the UK was “very real”. For this, they found themselves accused in some quarters of “crying wolf”.

However, they were taking steps to counter growing domestic extremism.

Prior to 7/7, in March 2005, Tony Blair’s government beefed up counter-terror laws with a new act giving the home secretary the power to impose “control orders” on anyone suspected of involvement in terrorist activity.

These powers included forced relocation away from suspected fellow plotters, curfews and restrictions on travel. However, critics rounded on Blair.

Some accused him of creating a pre-election “climate of fear”, then casting himself as the only politician with the mettle and the know-how to defeat it.

Others said that his decision to support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was coming back to haunt the UK.

Undeterred, his home secretary Charles Clarke immediately signed control orders for 10 men. But none of these 10 was plotting to blow up London that summer.

Authorities might have known an attack was coming, but they had failed to detect its origin. Post-July 2005, the British public’s most pressing concern was that nothing could stop extremists launching more suicide attacks.

The government set about reassuring them in a number of ways. Increased funding boosted MI5 staff numbers from 2,000 on 9/11 to some 3,800 in 2012.

The number of counter-terrorism police also expanded during this period, from a few hundred to 1,500 officers. Blair proposed counter-terrorism laws that – not for the first time – put his government on a collision course with the Law Lords and his own party members. Proposals included extending the maximum period for detention without charge from 14 to 90 days and the banning of fundamentalist organisations.

Although the 90-days proposal was defeated in Parliament, the 2006 Terrorism Act extended the maximum period of pre-charge detention from 14 to 28 days. Meantime, it became a criminal offence to publish statements that encouraged or glorified acts of terrorism, or to commit acts in preparation for terrorism.

The most controversial counter-terror tactic remained the use of control orders against terror suspects. The legality of almost every element of control orders was challenged by the Law Lords and, in 2006, a High Court judge ruled that they were incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

Yet, those charged with protecting us largely welcomed these new powers, citing their success in thwarting the 2006 Transatlantic Airline Plot that, had it been successful, would’ve dwarfed 7/7 in scale.

The plot – again, the brainchild of home-grown al-Qaeda terrorists – had been to plant suicide bombers on board seven flights leaving Heathrow for cities in America.

The bombers intended to kill themselves and thousands of passengers mid-air by detonating liquid explosives hidden in plastic bottles. The legacy of the foiled plot is still felt today, with airline passengers prohibited from carrying more than 100 millilitres of liquid on a commercial flight.

Sources from MI5 and the police told us that the detection of the Transatlantic Airline Plot showed that the lessons of 7/7 had been learned.

According to them, extra resources allow them to constantly reassess figures peripheral to terror investigations – as two of the 7/7 ringleaders had been in the years before their final suicide attacks. And powers like control orders – although since watered down – have helped them disrupt numerous terror plots and mass-casualty “spectaculars”.

Rest assured, they continue to worry about such ambitious plots. Both agencies are at a tempo previously unknown within their organisations to detect and thwart them. But they are generally able to disrupt plots involving lots of people because such endeavours require communication between those involved, as well as other activities that set off intelligence tripwires.

However, this success has come at a price – the rise of the so-called “lone wolf” terrorist. These individuals act independently, without direction from or communication with a larger group, helping them stay under the radar of law enforcement.

As we have seen in recent years, the seemingly random, opportunistic nature of their attacks and the extreme violence employed are horrifying.

Khairi Saadallah’s murder of three men in a park in Reading in 2020. Ali Harbi Ali’s killing of the Conservative MP David Amess in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, in 2021. And, of course, Axel Rudakubana, who fatally stabbed three young girls aged six, seven and nine at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport in July 2024.

While such sickening attacks shock us to the core and lead to unfathomable suffering for those directly involved, they affect many fewer people than a terror event like that of July 7, 2005.

Are we any more protected from a similar horror happening today?

Despite a sharp spike in 2017 – due to the dreadful attacks at Manchester Arena, Westminster and London Bridge – overall, the numbers of people killed and wounded by terror attacks in the UK has steadily decreased since 2005.

But, as the Provisional IRA used to chillingly taunt, they only have to be lucky once. The security services have to be lucky all the time.

Adapted extract from Three Weeks in July: 7/7, the aftermath and the deadly manhunt, by Adam Wishart and James Nally (Mudlark, £25) out now