London 7/7: The Atrocity We Don’t Talk About

On a stone plinth in Tavistock Square, in Bloomsbury, central London, sits a sculpture of an aged Mahatma Gandhi. He’s rendered cross-legged, with a shawl over his shoulder and his eyes cast forever downwards – a picture of contemplation, of peaceableness. Twenty years ago, this tribute to history’s most famous pacifist bore silent witness to an act of almost unspeakable violence.

At 9.46am on 7 July 2005, a No30 double-decker bus was drawing into the square. It shouldn’t have been there. But that morning, London’s transport network had descended into chaos. Throughout the Euston Road area, buses packed with the now late rush-hour crowds were being sent on diverted routes. Including the No30 to Hackney Wick making its way through Tavistock Square. On this particular bus, however, there was one passenger who was not off to work, or to college or even for a spot of sight-seeing. Eighteen-year-old Hasib Hussain was instead looking for an opportunity to detonate the bomb hidden inside his rucksack. At 9.47am, Hussain found that opportunity. The subsequent blast tore the bus apart, ripping through those closest to it. Hussain killed himself and 12 innocents, and injured many more.

It soon emerged that the carnage in Tavistock Square was the fourth and final act in an orchestrated suicide-bombing campaign, carried out by a gang of British jihadists. Six hours earlier, Hussain, alongside the bombers’ leader, 30-year-old Mohammad Sidique Khan, and 22-year-old Shehzad Tanweer, had set off from their hometown of Leeds in a rented car bound for Luton. There they met up with the fourth member of their crew, 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay, then living in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, but originally from Leeds. With backpacks laden with explosives, they then caught the train to London Kings Cross before entering the Tube network. The intention was clear – to set off bombs in packed train carriages during the morning rush hour.

At around 8.50am, three of them completed their squalid mission. Khan detonated his device on a westbound Circle Line train heading towards Paddington, killing six people. Tanweer did the same on an eastbound Circle Line train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, killing seven people. And Germaine Lindsay set off his bomb on the southbound Piccadilly Line just after it pulled out of Kings Cross, killing 26.