The Hallett Inquest into the 
July 7, 2005, London Bombings
 Karin Brothers            August
7, 2011

On Thursday, July 7th, 2005, the city of London, England was closed down after
morning rush hour explosions on three subway trains and a bus.  The blasts
killed 56 people and injured hundreds; the country was traumatized. 
Despite a non-credible claim of "al Qaida" responsibility that
originated in Texas (Pallister, 2005), Prime Minister Tony Blair refused to
hold an independent inquiry into its causes. And despite — or because of —
evidence that increasingly pointed to the complicity of British security
services, the government ignored the ongoing demands for an inquiry.  In
May 2010, Lady Justice Hallett courageously called for an inquest into the
activities of the British security services the year prior to the July 7th
bombings. There was no jury although the hearings were public. The families of
the 52 victims were permitted representation; the families of the four accused
were not.

The testimony indicated stunning confusion about details of the blasts and
raised even more questions about government involvement.  The official
story of July 7th bombings has the following elements: the four British Muslim
men, whom the police had not suspected of being dangerous,  surprised them
on July 7th by taking their homemade bombs from Luton to London to blow
themselves and others up on three subway trains and a bus. Their purported motive was to register their anger at the British
invasion of Iraq by martyring themselves.

Previous investigations documented contradictions to the official claims (Brothers,
2008) including: evidence that police were aware that the bombings were going
to happen, that police did know of three of the accused, that the bombs had
been identified as sophisticated military explosives, and that none of the
accused expected to die. There was no evidence that the accused intended harm
to anyone.  Lindsay’s and Khan’s
wives were pregnant (Lindsay’s wife had a child soon after 7/7); Hussain was
awaiting university entrance test results; Tanweer, recently graduated, had
just paid a large repair bill on his Mercedes. They all had return tickets,
they had paid their parking fees and their families all expected them
home.   In 2006, the British
government was forced to retract its initial claim that the accused had taken
certain commuter trains that would have allowed them to catch the exploding
subway cars.    

The Hallett inquest, which Britain’s
security services warned would "encourage terrorists," was held from
October to December 2010; the hearings were public but there was no jury.  Key issues in the inquest included the
timing, the location and the makeup of the bombs and how the police came to
identify the accused.

What
is known about what happened

To understand the implications of the
testimony at the Hallett Inquest, it’s necessary to review the initial accounts
of how the accused were identified and what discoveries have been made since
then. The following information was presented by mainstream newspapers on the
day shown unless otherwise noted, with information gathered later in brackets
and italics:

Thursday,
July 7th:

·      
London Transport reports at
8:51 a.m. that a power surge has caused problems on subways; at 9:20 they
report that there had actually been explosions on several trains;

·      
[Metropolitan Police admit, after initial denial, that they shut off
mobile phone reception in the London core for the hour after 8:50 a.m.];

·      
Police report that they
"can’t confirm" that "suicide bombers" caused the
explosions;

·      
It was broadcast at about 10:30
a.m.  and reported internationally
that police marksmen killed two or three "suicide bombers" at Canary
Wharf;

·      
Peter Powers of Visor
Consultants appears on British media to report the coincidence that his
emergency preparedness operation for simultaneous bombings, had been planned to
take place at the same times and the same subway stops as the day’s events;

·      
[The body count at Aldgate and Edgware does not include bodies of
"suicide bombers"];

Friday, July
8th:

·      
[The remains of Khan and Tanweer are discovered at Edgware and Aldgate
subway sites one to two days after the bombings.]

·      
[A newspaper article claims that Scotland Yard counter terrorism
unit believed Jermaine Lindsay to be alive on July 8th];

Monday, July 11:

·      
Explosives experts identify
London bombs as "sophisticated" and "not homemade" [Traces of the US military explosive C4 and
detonators would be confirmed later at all four blast sites (McGrory et al,
2005)];

Tuesday, July
12:

·      
Detectives start to examine
2500 CCTV tapes which was expected to take "at least" two weeks;

·      
Police call a press conference
to name Hasib Hussain, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shezad Tanweer as three of the
four "suicide bombers" responsible. They claimed that four Asian men
were seen together on [unreleased] CCTVs and by eyewitnesses taking one of two
commuter trains from Luton Station to King’s Cross, where they fanned out to
martyr themselves;

·      
Police claim that they had no
prior knowledge of any of the accused;

Wednesday
July 13:

·      
  The rapid identification of the accused seems to be
confirmed by 1) the discovery of a car at the Luton station parking lot that
police claim the suspects rented which had a trunk filled with "homemade
bombs" and 2) an address which police claimed was linked to an accused
which had a bathtub filled with "homemade explosive", which they
dubbed "the bomb factory."

·      
Police admit not knowing
whether all of the suspects died on July 7 (Bennetto, Herbert, 2005);

·      
Police claim the body of the
fourth "suicide bomber" is so badly shredded at the Piccadilly blast
that DNA is required for his identification.

·      
[The wife of Jermaine Lindsay reports him missing; police search his
home.]

Thursday, July 14th:

·      
Police claim that DNA tests
indicate Jermaine Lindsay as the "fourth bomber" ; his passport and
papers are discovered "near him" at that blast site;

August 24, 2005:

·      
Metropolitan Police claim that
they are in possession of the bodies of all "suicide bombers" which
they are keeping to reassemble for analysis — six weeks after 7/7!

July 11, 2006:

·      
British Home Secretary John
Reid admits that the commuter trains of July 7, 2005 — that the government
claimed it had CCTV and witness proof that the accused had taken — had been
cancelled.  [The implications are stunning: if
the accused had tried to take those trains, they could not have been in London
in time to be on the exploding subway cars. This would explain why no CCTV photos of Khan, Tanweer or Lindsay have
been released proving they were in London on July 7th.]

 The Hallett investigations:

What did  happen on July 7^th?

The testimony indicated that the pattern of injured and
dead on the trains does not match the claims of where the bombs were supposedly
detonated.  The damaged subway cars were disposed of without the damage
being properly documented, leaving questions about how many cars were involved
(initial reports of six or seven explosions were later changed to four), what
direction they were traveling in, where the explosions originated in the cars,
and even which train lines were affected.  Evidence also indicated that
the explosion at Aldgate preceded those at Edgware and Piccadilly by several
minutes. Observed injuries tended to indicate the legs and feet, which
corresponds to witness accounts of damage coming from under the cars’ floors
but is not consistent with backpack bombs in packed trains.  There are
even questions about what caused the explosions, since many witnesses insist
that that there actually was an electrical power surge, possibly before other
explosions.  No autopsies were performed on those "unlawfully
killed", which might have shed light on the causes of their deaths.  

Despite the London bus company’s claim that the CCTV tapes from the No. 30 bus
were given to the police, Scotland Yard claimed that the (four) CCTV cameras on
the bus were "not working"; 
so there were no pictures of Hussain on the bus. The number of dead had
been reported as 2, 13 or 14.

 How did police identify those accused of
the Aldgate and Edgware Road sites?

A. The identification of Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shezad Tanweer:

According to the Hallett testimony, the unidentifiable remains of Khan and
Tanweer were only discovered after a day or two in the respective subway
cars.  The testimony claimed that their remains had been reduced to chunks
of flesh – with no hands, heads or even teeth: in Tanweer’s case, only a 1.8 Kg
of backbone. (In contrast, the other bodies — there were even nearby survivors
— were easily identifiable.) Police turned over their remains to labs already
identified (J7 blogspots) ; there was no explanation
about how police had actually come to identify the remains of Khan or Tanweer.

This testimony contradicts the initial police story which implied that the only
identification problem requiring DNA was Jermaine Lindsay, who was identified
two days after the others, on July 14th.  

B. The identification of the alleged bus bomber Hasib
Hussain:

Hallett testimony revolved around the CCTV image and eyewitness accounts on
July 7th. Despite Hussain reportedly wandering around for almost an hour after
the subway explosions, only one CCTV photo was released, after he apparently
bought a battery. (This implied that he assumed he would have an opportunity to
use it!) His repeated attempts to call the other accused after 9 am show that
he thought they were alive; the police’s unexplained shut- down of London’s cell phone system for the hour
after the subway explosions meant he could not reach them or have known about
the explosions.

Bus No. 30 eyewitness accounts were contradictory in every respect. While there
seems to be no doubt about Hussain’s death on the No. 30 bus, there was no
evidence that he caused the explosion.

C. The identification of Germaine/Jermaine Lindsay:

Those monitoring the inquest were surprised that police did not explain how
Lindsay was identified.  The case
surrounding Germaine Lindsay is particularly strange.  Police removed
Lindsay’s car from the Luton parking lot hours after the July 7 explosions; its
registration was on their database because of a previous infraction. On July
12th, police identified a King’s Cross photo of Lindsay (a black Jamaican) as
Tanweer (of Pakistani descent)!  On
July 13th a police spokesman admitted that police did not know if all of the
suspects died on July 7th.

The police claimed that they needed time to identify the shredded remains of
the fourth "suicide bomber" through DNA analysis, but investigators
noticed that Lindsay was not identified until after his wife called to report
him missing on July 13th.  It was only after the search of Lindsay’s home
that police claimed they found his passport at the blast site and publicly
identified him on July 14th.

Given the claim at the Hallett inquest that police had Khan and Tanweer’s
bodies by July 9th, the July 13th police admission that they were not in possession
of at least some suspects’ bodies had to mean that they did not have Lindsay’s.
Newspaper articles from The Guardian
(Jones, 2005) and (The Bucks Herald,
2005) bear this out.  Additionally,
the police refusal to identify Lindsay as a "suicide bomber" until
after he was reported missing and the absence of testimony explaining how his
body was identified indicate that Lindsay survived July 7th.

 Conclusions: The implications of the
evidence to date:

While there is speculation that the accused may have been recruited as
"suicide bombers" to correspond with the emergency-preparedness
operation, it is apparent that they were connected with a reported British
agent, Haroon Rachid Aswat.  Aswat
is claimed to have visited the bombers in the weeks before the attacks and made
about 20 calls to them until shortly before the blasts. (Ahmed, 2006,
274).  Despite being on a security watch list, it appears that Aswat
arrived in Britain two weeks before July 7th and left just hours before the
London Transport explosions.  British authorities have reportedly not been
interested in questioning him about his possible role in the July 7th events.
(Woods et al, 2005)

The accused could not arrived in London when the blasts occurred because the
commuter trains they were meant to have taken were either cancelled or
delayed.  They would not have found out about the subway explosions
because of the London Transport reports of a "power surge" as well as
the police shut- down of London’s cell phone system for the following
hour.  As apparently- scripted "suicide bombers", they had to be
killed before they learned about the explosions on their trains and spoke to
any media.  The "operational cell phones" they were given for
this event would have given police their location as they went to Canary Wharf,
where police marksmen killed them as "suicide bombers!"  Canary Wharf is a media center and the
reports of their deaths were reported internationally because of the media
witnesses there.  

Once in possession of Khan and Tanweer’s bodies, police would have needed to
make it appear that they had been killed by explosions rather than by bullets.
Their remains were consistent with having been destroyed by close contact with
explosives, but not consistent with the explosions at the subway blast sites,
where all of the bodies were basically intact. The (presumed) remains of Khan
and Tanweer were found at the subway sites one to two days after all the other
bodies were found.  Police seemed to be unsure of where to spread their
identification papers which supposedly survived the vaporization of their
bodies; Khan’s identification papers were found at Edgware, Aldgate and even on
the No. 30 bus!

International experts had claimed from the start that the bombs used in all of
the July 7 bombings were sophisticated, and traces of an unusual variant of the
US military explosive C4 with detonators had been identified at all sites. The
subsequent police discovery and identification of “homemade explosives" in
a rented car and in an apartment with no obvious connection to the accused were
treated by the police as if it proved both that they had identified the accused
correctly and that the July 7th bombs were
homemade.  The media has played a
largely obedient role by repeating 
the “homemade” story even when Scotland Yard retracted their
identification of this material (Ahmed, 2006, 31, 45).  Hallett testimony
showed that the blast sites indicated no evidence of "homemade"
explosive.  The use of sophisticated bombs using military explosive, the
placement of bombs underneath the trains, as well as the government’s  dishonesty in presenting false evidence
against the accused, suggest that British security agencies framed the accused.

The accused,
among the least likely to have committed any acts of terrorism, have been
convicted by the media of crimes they would certainly have been exonerated of
had they lived to defend themselves. The fact that they were such unlikely
terrorists has been used by the British government as a further excuse to
expand their surveillance of the Muslim community for
"extremism".  This newly- created paradigm of "home grown
terrorists" has been used successfully to obtain convictions of Muslims in
Britain, the US and Canada.  These cases have created dangerous legal
precedents, and have eroded civil liberties and the justice systems in their
respective countries.
 
In May 2011 the Hallett Inquest determined that 52 of the 56 London deaths had
been "unlawful", the fault only of the "bombers" rather
than of the hours-long medical response time or a lack of diligence of the
security services.  Hallett refused the families of the accused the
further investigation they had requested into how their loved ones might have
come to have been involved.  On August 2, 2011 a legal challenge by
victims’ families to force the British government to hold a public inquiry into
the July 7 attacks was abandoned "acknowledging
that the proceedings would be likely to be unsuccessful." The July 7th
Truth Campaign’s efforts to obtain an independent inquiry are continuing.

References:

·      
Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. 2006.
The London Bombings, London: Duckworth
Bennetto, J, Herbert, I, 2005. The suicide bomb plot hatched in Yorkshire. 13
July. The Independent. Retrieved July 28, 2011 at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/the-suicide-bomb-plot-hatched-in-yorkshire-498616.html

·      
Brothers, Karin 2008.
Physics911. The Stepford Double-cross: How the London bombings turned every
Muslim into a terror suspect. Accessed Aug 7, 2011: https://physics-911.com/karinbrothers

·      
J7 blogspot Khan. The
identification of Mohammed Sidique Khan. J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign. 
Accessed July 28, 2011 at:  Http://77inquests.blogspot.com/search/label/Mohammed%20Sidique%20Khan?updated-max=2011-02-18T14%3A22%3A00Z&max-results=20

·      
J7 blogspot Tanweer. The July
7th Truth Campaign.  Accessed July 28, 2011 at:  Http://77inquests.blogspot.com/2010/11/77-inquests-disintegration-of-shehzad.html
Jones, Sam 2005. Aylesbury house is searched in effort to find associates.
Thursday, July 14. The Guardian. Retrieved on July 28, 2011 at  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/14/july7.uksecurity11

·      
Pallister, David 2005. UK-based
dissident denies link to website that carried al-Qaida claim. The Guardian.
Saturday July 9. Retrieved at July 28 at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/09/july7.uksecurity11

·      
The Bucks Herald 2005.
Aylesbury was ’30 minutes from evacuation’.  Tuesday, 25 October. The
Bucks Herald. Retrieved July 28, 2011 at: http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/aylesbury_was_30_minutes_from_evacuation_1_600516

·      
Woods, R, Leppard, D., Smith,
M. 2005. Tangled web that still leaves worrying loose ends: The arrest of
Haroon Rashid Aswat sets numerous questions.  July 31. The Sunday Times.
retrieved June 26, 2008:   http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article549996.ece