Were the bombings on the London underground on July 7th, 2005, really carried out by four young Muslim “suicide terrorists” or were they actually orchestrated by former Prime Minister Tony Blair and carried out by black ops commandos of the British army’s Force Reconnaissance Regiment to stoke public fear and keep the “war on terrorism” rolling along?

That is the fascinating question explored by British researcher Dr. Nick Kollerstrom in his brilliant new expose, Terror on the Tube, in which he peers “behind the veil of 7/7” to try to discover the truth about who was responsible for the shocking events that day.  

 

For the past seven years we have been told repeatedly by the British authorities that four “homemade bombs” were exploded in London on 7/7 (three in underground trains and one in a double-decker bus) by four British-born Muslims (Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Germaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussein) who brought the explosives with them in rucksacks on the train from Luton. 

 

But recently, thanks to the work of Kollerstrom and other researchers, serious doubts have been cast on that official story, and many people in Britain and around the world have begun wondering whether something very different happened in London that morning.

 

[Originally published in the Victoria Street Newz July 2012 issue.]

 

Indeed, in his well-documented 328-page presentation, Kollerstrom makes a compelling case that the four young Muslims were innocent patsies who had been lured into participating in “anti-terrorism drills” – which, by a remarkable “coincidence,” were being staged in London on the morning of 7/7 – and were set up so they could be blamed for the bombs which were actually planted and detonated by commandos of the Force Reconnaissance Regiment.

Kollerstrom notes that by the summer of 2005 much of the fear and hysteria that had been whipped up by the phony 9/11 “terrorist attacks” in the United States had dissipated in Britain and Tony Blair and his super-hawk cronies were becoming alarmed that the “war on terrorism” was losing momentum and peace seemed to be breaking out, so to speak.  

It became clear to Blair and his gungho-for-war inner circle, Kollerstrom believes, that something had to be done to scare the public into continuing to support the phony war on terrorism in general and the bogus wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in particular – and it was decided that what had to be done was to stage false-flag “bomb attacks” in London and blame them on “Muslim terrorists.”

Kollerstrom puts together a complex “jigsaw puzzle” consisting of hundreds of pieces of evidence, and one has to carefully examine each of these pieces before one can see clearly the picture that emerges from this “puzzle.”

Unfortunately, it isn’t possible, of course, for us to look at all of the “pieces of the puzzle” in this article, but we will look at twenty of the most important points Kollerstrom makes: seven in this issue, seven in the August edition and six more in the September edition.

 

• Contrary to the official story that just four bombs were exploded in London on July 7th, 2005, there is overwhelming evidence that at least twelve bombs were detonated – and possibly as many as seventeen. There were many more bomb blasts than could possibly have been produced by the four alleged suicide bombers.
  

By far the most authoritative independent expert on the forensic evidence related to the events of 7/7 is David Minahan, a veteran forensic analyst who worked for many years as a claims investigator for a London-based insurance company.  After carefully examining hundreds of pieces of evidence for more than a year, Minahan produced a meticulously documented dossier entitled A Forensic Analysis of the 7/7 London Bombings.

“It is obvious to anyone who studies the evidence,” Minahan says, “that the authorities have carried out a massive cover-up and campaign of disinformation about what happened in London on July 7th, 2005.  

Not surprisingly, Minahan’s study has been totally blacked out of the mainstream media, which dutifully parrot the government’s four-bomb story.  But the report is an invaluable historical document and, as Kollerstrom notes, if any honest public inquiry is ever held into 7/7, the Minahan dossier would be the obvious place to begin.  

• The enormous explosive force produced and devastating damage caused by the bombs in London on 7/7 clearly resulted from the use of high-powered military-grade explosives such as C4. The explosions were many times more powerful than could have been caused by the “homemade TATP explosives” allegedly used by the four “suicide bombers” – and, indeed, the authorities publicly acknowledged C4 had been used for five days following 7/7 until they abruptly changed their story and began claiming the blasts had been caused by four Muslim kids with backpack bombs.

In the days following 7/7, all of the police officials and forensic experts agreed the bomb blasts had involved the use of the high-powered military plastic explosive C4 and that the explosions had been detonated by remote-control.  Indeed, the media reported traces of C4 had been found at all of the blast sites and that some fragments of remote-control timing and detonating equipment had also been found in the rubble.

French anti-terrorism chief Christophe Chaboud, who came to London to assist with the investigation, said the evidence showed there was massive damage in the underground caused by “high-powered military-grade plastic explosives” and the main concern should be to find out how “terrorists” had been able to acquire such explosives as C4, which are very tightly controlled and usually available only to elite military units.  

Similar comments were made by Vincent Cannistro, former head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre, who said it was “highly disturbing” that pieces of “sophisticated remote-control detonation equipment” had been found in the debris at  some of the blast sites along with traces of military-grade explosives.  He and other officials called for “a Europe-wide investigation” to get to the bottom of the matter.

Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick said: “It is clear that high explosives were used in the attacks and they were not home-made.”

Suddenly, however, on July 12th it was announced out of the blue that “exceptional investigative work” by the London Metropolitan Police had uncovered “evidence” that the bombings had actually been carried out by four young Muslim “suicide bombers” using the explosive TATP, which they had brewed themselves in a bathtub in Leeds and brought into London in rucksacks on the morning of 7/7.

 

“As I floated through the air,” he recalls, “I was wondering if I’d be alive when I came down.” 

 

At that point all of the initial reports about C4 and remote-control detonators were, to use Kollerstrom’s words, “airbrushed out of history,” never to be mentioned again by the authorities.

Everyone was now told to believe instead the Muslim-kids-with-TATP story – though, as we will see later, the TATP story would also change many times over the past seven years and, indeed, to this day the authorities still can’t, or won’t, provide a clear honest answer to the simple question of what explosives were used in the 7/7 bombings.  

• At least some of the bomb blasts in the underground, and possibly all of them, were clearly caused by explosives planted under the train carriages – not by explosives carried into the carriages in rucksacks, as officially claimed.

Among the dozens of survivors who said there were explosions underneath the trains on which they were travelling was Ray Whitehurst, the driver of a Circle Line train bombed near Edgware Road Station.  The front part of the train was thrust upward so violently, Whitehurst recalls, that “it was lifted right up off the rails.”

A passenger on the Edgware train, David Gardiner, gave a dramatic account of being blown upwards and hitting his head on the roof of the coach.  “As I floated through the air,” he recalls, “I was wondering if I’d be alive when I came down.”

At the Aldgate station, survivor Mustafa Kurtuldu said the train he was on was also “lifted up off the rails,” and another passenger Bruce Lait said a huge hole was blown in the floor of the carriage.  “The metal,” Lait said, “was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train.  While the authorities say the bomb was left in a bag, I don’t remember anybody being where the bomb was or any bag.”

Lait’s account is corroborated by other passengers such as Emma Brown and Terence Hiscock and by a police officer, Lizzie Kenworthy, who was one of the first rescue workers to enter the coach and found “a big hole in the centre of the floor with the metal twisted upward.”

At the blast site near Russell Square of the 112 passengers who survived, not one remembered seeing alleged bomber Germaine Lindsay or any rucksack – but several reported their coach being lifted off the rails.  Survivors Joe Orr and Gracia Homiguez gave especially vivid accounts of a huge blast from below ripping apart the floor of the carriage and blowing off the feet and legs of a number of passengers.  

Journalist Mark Honigsbaum of The Guardian stood outside the Edgware Road station all morning on 7/7 speaking to survivors as they were evacuated – and he was told repeatedly the bombs had exploded underneath the trains.  For example, one survivor recalled that “the tiles and covers on the floor of the train suddenly flew up.”  Sadly, Honigsbaum later performed some Houdini-like contortions to try to reconcile his on-the-spot reporting on 7/7 with the official bombs-inside-the-carriages story that the authorities started telling on July 12th – but by that time the truth-bearing genie was already out of the lamp!

As for who likely planted the bombs under the trains, Kollerstrom and a number of other 7/7 critics believe the evidence clearly points to the Force Reconnaissance Regiment, the super-secret black ops unit which had been created on April 6th, 2005 – just three months before 7/7.  “The FRR,” Kollerstrom notes, “was completely above the law and had a license to kill – and all its members were trained in sophisticated bomb-making technology.”

Two other leading 7/7 critics, retired Australian police officer Andrew MacGregor and French researcher Thierry Meyssan, also believe the explosives were almost certainly planted under the trains by FRR commandos.  “Realistically,” Meyssan says, “no one else could possibly have acquired explosives such as C4 and then carried out such an operation without being detected.”

• The official story that the only trains bombed in the London underground on 7/7 were the three on which alleged bombers Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Germaine Lindsay were travelling away from King’s Cross station was flatly contradicted by credible testimony from a number of passengers aboard trains going toward King’s Cross station who said their trains were also bombed.  

One of the most important witnesses in the 7/7 story was an Indian passenger named Kurush Anklesaria who thought he would be taking a routine trip on the London underground that morning.  As it turned out, however, Anklesaria’s recollections about what happened that day would flatly contradict the government’s official version on no fewer than three counts.            

First, the Circle Line train on which Anklesaria was travelling and which he said was bombed was not one of the three trains that the authorities claim were the only ones bombed on 7/7.  Secondly, Anklesaria says the train he was aboard was travelling toward King’s Cross station, not away from it.  And thirdly, Anklesaria says the floor of the train he was on was ripped open by a powerful blast that clearly seemed to be caused by explosives underneath the train, not inside the carriage.

So, if Anklesaria’s testimony is honest and accurate (and there is every reason to believe it is), on that basis alone the government’s official story about 7/7 is down the tube, if you will pardon the expression!  It should also be noted Anklesaria’s testimony was corroborated by a number of other credible witnesses, including Eamon Spellman, Zeyned Basci, Mandy Yu, Aaron Roche and Grassiere Homiguez.

Moreover, two American girls who were sight-seeing that morning, Katie and Emily Benton, said they were travelling eastwards out of Paddington and toward King’s Cross station when the train they were on was rocked by a huge explosion.

And perhaps the most poignant evidence contradicting the official story came from a young man named James White, who wasn’t on the London underground that morning but who testified he received a phone call from his girlfriend Jenny Nicholson just minutes before the train on which she was travelling toward King’s Cross station was bombed and she was killed. on  -- not, as one might have expected, to reassure the British people that a full-scale independent inquiry would be held to determine who had committed these atrocities – but instead to declare, without offering a shred of evidence, that he already knew Islamic extremists were responsible and there was no need for any independent investigation.  

Blair’s statement, made less than eight hours after the bombings, was especially astounding in view of the fact that the London Metropolitan Police publicly acknowledged the following morning that it was still unclear who had carried out the bombings and the investigation remained wide open.  

As the weeks and months went by, Blair continued to stonewall, steadfastly refusing to hold an independent public inquiry even when a large group of exasperated 7/7 survivors and relatives of those who had been killed sent an impassioned letter to the Home Office on May 1st, 2007, calling for “an independent and impartial public inquiry” into 7/7.  Blair also brusquely rejected a motion passed on May 28th, 2007, by the Greater London Council calling for an independent inquiry.

The official reason Blair gave was that an independent inquiry would be “a ludicrous waste of resources” but, as Kollerstrom clearly demonstrates in his book, the real reason was that the story Blair was telling the British people about 7/7 was a pack of lies from beginning to end and he knew it would collapse within a matter of minutes if subjected to critical scrutiny at an honest inquiry.  
By quickly declaring on the evening of 7/7 that the bombings had been carried out by “Islamic extremists,” Blair established the “official story” of what had happened and, unfortunately, from that point on hardly anyone was brave enough to publicly question that official version.  Almost all of the public, the police, politicians, news media, academics and judiciary blindly accepted Blair’s story like docile, unquestioning little lambs – and everywhere that Tony went the lambs were sure to go!

 

• Another huge red flag was unfurled at seven o’clock on the evening of 7/7 when Peter Power, president of Visor Consulting and a former top official of Scotland Yard, went on the BBC and claimed that one of history’s greatest “coincidences” had supposedly taken place that day: his company just happened to be carrying out anti-terrorism exercises in the London underground at the same time and in the same locations where the real “terrorist attacks” occurred.

A visibly shaken Power said “the hairs on the back of (his) neck had stood up” when he learned that “by an amazing coincidence” there had been real “terror attacks” that morning at the same Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square stations where his company had been carrying out simulated anti-terrorism exercises.

Actually, of course, as Kollerstrom notes, the odds against such a “coincidence” happening would be more than a billion to one, and it is much more likely these “anti-terror drills” were really being used as a cover to help the authorities carry out the 7/7 fraud.
Moreover, as those familiar with the 9/11 evidence will recall, by another remarkable “coincidence,” Vice-President Dick Cheney just happened to have arranged for “war games” involving planes flying into skyscrapers in New York City to be held on the morning of September 11th, 2001.  The odds against such “anti-terror exercises” being scheduled by pure coincidence for both 9/11 and 7/7 would be more than a trillion to one!

As 7/7 critic Andrew MacGregor notes, these anti-terror drills appear to have played a key role in facilitating the 7/7 fraud.  “The evidence indicates,” MacGregor says, “that Mohammed Sidique Khan and his ‘co-conspirators’ were among dozens of people who had been hired by Visor Consultants to take part in these drills – but the four young men had no idea they were being set up to be ‘suicide bombers.’”   Another 7/7 expert Anthony John Hill agrees “the four men were clearly lured into these exercises so they could be used as patsies in a classic ‘false-flag’ operation.”

When Peter Power was asked who had ordered the counter-terrorism drills, he stonewalled for months before finally revealing his main client was a relatively obscure company called Reed Elsevier.  Many are skeptical about that claim, however, and it remains unclear to this day who was really behind these anti-terrorism exercises.

Nor is it clear why Power chose to make his startling public disclosure on the evening of 7/7 – but Kollerstrom and some others believe it was likely a case of self-preservation.  It seems clear Power had not been told by the inner circle of 7/7 planners exactly what was going to occur that day, so when he saw what happened to the four young Muslim patsies, Power probably felt his best defense against possibly suffering a similar fate was to go public about the anti-terror exercises.

• The so-called “evidence” which the authorities produced to demonstrate the guilt of the four young Muslims accused of the bombings was flimsy at best and much of it was downright ridiculous.

The alleged ring-leader of the “7/7 terrorists,” Mohammed Sidique Khan, must surely have been the most unusual “suicide bomber” in history since he apparently managed to blow himself up in no fewer than four different locations!

In different parts of the government’s Official Narrative of Events, published ten months after 7/7, we are told identifiable fragments of Khan’s body and pieces of his clothing and personal belongings were found splattered about at Aldgate Station, Edgware Road Station and Tavistock Square.  And five years later, in evidence presented at Justice Heather Hallett’s official inquest, we learned this astonishingly ubiquitous “suicide bomber” must also have been present at Russell Square since his cellphone was reportedly found in the rubble at that blast site.

Eventually the authorities officially placed the elusive Khan in a coach near Edgware Road Station where he supposedly blew himself to smithereens with a rucksack full of TATP explosives, though conveniently leaving behind a number of paper and plastic identification documents which survived the blast in remarkably good condition.

Initially the police couldn’t find a single witness who had remembered seeing anyone resembling Khan or any rucksack in the coach – but, more than two months later, a passenger name Dan Biddle, who had been severely injured in the explosion and who was relentlessly questioned by police and repeatedly shown pictures of Khan while he recovered in hospital, said he “remembered” seeing Khan.  This pathetic “witness” is the only person who claims to have seen Khan in the train, or anywhere else in London for that matter, on 7/7.

Meanwhile, at the blast site at Russell Square, the official story was equally absurd.  As we noted earlier, not a single one of the 112 survivors of that explosion remembered seeing alleged bomber Germaine Lindsay or the large rucksack he had supposedly been carrying.  Indeed, a passenger named Jude Obi, who we are told was sitting right next to Lindsay when he allegedly blew himself up, astonishingly wasn’t injured at all and walked away from the scene.  Obi not only didn’t notice Lindsay or any rucksack but says he didn’t even realize that a bomb had been exploded.  “I thought at first”, Obi says, “that the train had been derailed.”

The official account was similarly ridiculous in the case of the train bombed at Aldgate Station where passengers William Walsh and Greg Shannon, who were supposedly sitting right next to Shehzad Tanweer when he allegedly blew himself into 52 tiny pieces, sustained only minor injuries in the blast and neither remembered seeing Tanweer or any rucksack.  Fortunately for the authorities, however, this remarkably considerate “jihadist” had brought along on his “suicide mission” a number of identification documents, which all miraculously survived the explosion in quite good condition.

But of all the nonsense concerning magically surviving identification documents, the funniest – and most embarrassing to the authorities – occurred at the site of the bus bombing at Tavistock Square when police proudly trumpeted they had found in the rubble the driver’s license of alleged bomber Hasib Hussein.  That “discovery” soon had to be “airbrushed out of history,” however, when it turned out Hussein didn’t have a driver’s license.  While it still isn’t clear who planted the phony “driver’s license,” it obviously wasn’t Secret Agent 007.  This was much more likely the work of Secret Agent 000!

By this time it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that neither Mia Scott nor Sapna Khimani, the passengers in the seats next to the one in which Hasib Hussein was supposedly sitting, had noticed the huge teenager or the large rucksack he was allegedly carrying.  Indeed, not a single passenger on the bus remembered seeing Hussein – at least not until five years after 7/7!  In 2010 one of the bus passengers, Lisa French, who had been severely traumatized by the explosion and who had received years of psychiatric treatment, told police she finally “remembered” seeing Hussein on the bus.  Pathetically, the police quickly jumped on her “recollection” claiming they now had a witness who placed Hussein at the crime scene.  

Actually the question of whether or not Hussein had been aboard the bus could have been answered definitively by viewing the videotapes from the four surveillance cameras on the bus – but the police said, unfortunately, those cameras had not been turned on that day.  That claim was flatly contradicted by officials of Stagecoach Transport, which owned the bus.  They said the cameras had been working and the tapes had been turned over to the Metropolitan Police.  Nonetheless, the authorities continue to stonewall to this day, insisting no surveillance pictures were taken on the bus.

We should also look at one more of the most notably ridiculous parts of the 7/7 farce: the story of how the four “suicide bombers” travelled from Luton to London that morning.  In the government’s Official Narrative of Events, published on June 5th, 2006, we are told there is incontrovertible evidence they took the 7:40 a.m. Thameslink train from Luton to King’s Cross Station.  But on July 11th, 2006, a red–faced Home Secretary John Reid admitted in Parliament there hadn’t been any 7:40 a.m. train from Luton to King’s Cross Station on the morning of July 7th, 2005!

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In next month’s Street Newz, when we continue our look at the dark and ghastly but nonetheless fascinating story of what really happened in London on July 7th, 2005, we will see that:
•  Key parts of the official version of 7/7, especially the story about the explosives, changed many times over the past seven years – some “evidence” magically appeared while other “evidence” magically disappeared.
•  There was a lot of hocus-pocus with surveillance pictures in London and Luton as some photos were “doctored” and some time-stamps were falsified to incriminate the four alleged suicide bombers.
•  The surveillance system on the London underground on 7/7 was controlled, not by British transport officials, but by Verint Systems, an Israeli security company headed by Dan Bodner and Kobi Alexander, two highly controversial former senior officers in the Israeli Army.
•  Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was visiting London on July 7th, 2005, received advance warning of the bombings according to a report on Israeli Army News.
•  Overall control of the London Transport System on 7/7 was in the hands of Bob Kiley, a notoriously hawkish former high-level official in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
•  A mysterious shooting incident occurred at Canary Wharf in East London on the morning of 7/7 and it appears some of the alleged suicide bombers might have been executed at that time.
•  Claims by the authorities that the alleged suicide bombers left large amounts of explosives in a car at Luton and in a bathtub at Leeds are almost certainly bogus.  
Gordon Pollard, who is a native of Victoria, has a MA in History from Columbia University in New York City and a BA in History and English from the University of Victoria.  After working for 10 years as a journalist in B.C., Alberta, and Ontario, Gordon spent 20 years teaching English and History in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka.