An unforgettable day for
most British, it was 21 July, 2005. Britain was still reeling from an al Qaeda
suicide bomb attack that killed 52 people in the worst terrorist atrocity the
country has ever seen.
Four young men on the run
unleashing the biggest police manhunt in British history.
The smell of burning rubber, three rucksacks full of explosives ditched at Tube stations. An hour later the same on an east London bus.
Exactly two weeks on, an
identical attack had been launched on identical targets: three Tube trains and
a London bus.
Unlike 7/7, however, when
the terrorists tried to set them off, the detonators ignited but the explosives
did not.
At that point, passengers
on those trains and the bus had no way of knowing that they owed their lives to
a breakdown in communication between the terror gang and their master.
Ringleader Muktar Said
Ibrahim and his three accomplices had prepared the explosives along the same
lines as Mohammed Sidique Khan and his fellow 7/7 bombers.
The crucial difference
between the two was a lack of technical support.
When Khan and his gang ran
into problems preparing their weapons of mass murder, they received a helping
hand from Rashied Raouf, al Qaeda's key operational co-ordinator for both
plots.
Raouf remained in close
contact with the four-man 7/7 cell in the UK throughout the process of making
the bombs, and continued to encourage them until the moment they launched their
attacks.
But when Ibrahim, his other
protégé, returned to the UK he stopped communicating, an after-action report
compiled by Raouf later revealed.
As he had been taught,
Ibrahim assembled his four-man kill team and built the bombs.
All he lacked was the
guidance to get them to work properly.
It was later said in court
that had they gone off, dozens of people would have died.
Raouf was the link man in
Pakistan between British volunteers and al Qaeda and was a key player in
several plots against his home country.
The son of a baker, he fled
the UK following the murder of his uncle.
He then married the
sister-in-law of Maulana Masood Azhar, the head and founder of Jaish Mohammed,
a Pakistani jihadi group, and quickly rose through al Qaeda's ranks.
He is "credited"
with discovering Khan and fellow 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer in Pakistan, who at
the time were intent on martyring themselves over the border in Afghanistan.
Instead, he helped turn
them back on Britain, with devastating consequences.
"We know from documents
that have emerged from al Qaeda itself that the sort of handler of the two
[Raouf] when they were travelling around Afghanistan/Pakistan these two
individuals had been identified to him by other people ... to look out
for," said Raffaelo Pantucci, director of international security studies
at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
"When he initially
approached them they expressed a desire to launch, to fight and die in
Afghanistan. This was sort of their goal.
"He then introduced
them to another leader of al Qaeda who instead seemed to have persuaded them
that actually their duty was going to be more use was to return back to the
United Kingdom and launch an attack and then we start in motion the process of
the 7/7 attack."
Raouf was later implicated
in the plot to blow up airliners using liquid explosives targeting 1,500
passengers by a cell of followers from High Wycombe and London.
He was held in jail in
Pakistan but mysteriously escaped without effort.
Ibrahim, Yassin Omar, Ramzi
Mohammed, and Hussain Osman were caught, tried and jailed for life with a
minimum term of 40 years for the failed 21/7 plot in 2007.
Raouf was reported by his
family to have been killed in a drone strike the following year.
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