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manufactured in a flat they sublet from an Egyptian chemistry student. Prolonged exposure to bleach had started to turn their hair white, something they attributed to the swimming baths they used. The foursome took a train into King’s Cross. At the entrance to the Underground, they hugged and split up, two on to the District and Circle line—taking trains going in opposite directions—and two destined for the Piccadilly line. At 8.50 Shehzad Tanweer blew himself up, killing eight people and wounding 171. So did Mohammed Siddique Khan in the second carriage of another train, killing seven and injuring 163. On the Piccadilly line, Jermaine Lindsay blew himself up as the train sped through its deep tunnels, killing twenty-seven people and injuring 340. Meanwhile, Habib Hussain meandered around King’s Cross and then took a bus to Euston station. There he switched to a number 30 bus, where, sitting at the back on the upper level, he detonated a bomb which killed fourteen people and wounded 110 near the green oasis of Tavistock Square.

A grim-faced Tony Blair raced back to London to put his characteristic imprint on the occasion. A brilliantly conducted police investigation traced evidence gathered at the crime scenes back through CCTV footage to the cars still parked at Luton and from there up the M1 to a bomb-making factory in Leeds. The men’s anxious wives and families had by then declared that they were missing. In September, Al-Jazeera TV would broadcast the six-minute suicide video will of Mohammed Siddique Khan, defiantly jabbing his finger from beyond the grave: ‘Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of the situation.’109

Khan, Hussain and Tanweer were from Beeston, a run-down Pakistani suburb of Leeds, although none of them was deprived himself. Aged thirty when he died, ‘Sid’ Khan had done a business-studies degree, working voluntarily in a primary school where he helped pupils with special needs, behavioural and language difficulties. He was married, to a woman of his choice, and had a child. Tanweer was the son of a fish-and-chip shop owner. A proficient athlete and cricketer, he had taken a qualification in sports science, but had no job apart from helping his father. Hussain was not very bright either, intermittently attending a business-studies programme. He was the most outwardly religious of the group, going on the hajj in 2002, and ostentatiously advertising his support for Al Qaeda after 9/11. This was a tight little world, centred around three mosques, an Islamic bookshop, a community centre and a gym. Evidence for some malign clerical mentor is slight; more probably this was a case of auto-radicalisation in which the group talked itself into violence. The older and more dominant Khan began to give the other two lectures that could also be seen as sermons. They went on group camping, paint-balling and white-water-rafting trips with others, expeditions designed for male bonding and quasi-military training. Some time in 2004 Khan encountered Jermaine Lindsay on the Yorkshire Islamist scene. Of Jamaican origin Lindsay had followed his mother into Islam, taking the name Jamal and adopting an extreme jihadist version of his new faith. After his mother moved to the US in 2002, Lindsay lived on welfare benefits before becoming a carpet fitter. He married a white British convert to Islam and had a child. Between 19 November 2004 and 8 February 2005, Khan and Tanweer visited Pakistan, and probably had contact with Islamist terrorists. After the broadcast of Khan’s suicide video, Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a second tape in which he claimed that Al Qaeda had ‘launched’ the attacks in Britain.

The couple of years it takes to bring terrorists to trial, and rules governing sub-judice reporting, mean that the British justice system almost conspires to minimise the gravity of simultaneous and interrelated terrorist plots. After two-and-a-half