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Were the London bombings a set up?

William Bowles | 15.07.2005 22:30 | Analysis | London

I’m leery of conspiracy theories, especially when they involve convoluted plots. Occam’s Razor is my guide, however, ever since the events of July 7 something has been nagging at me about the nature of the latest terrorist attack, and not merely the timing but the methods.

Call it a gut reaction if you like but as more information has become available my suspicions have heightened that all may not be as it seems. And as the four young men are (conveniently) dead, we’ll never hear their side of the story.

Consider the facts:

The four knew each other, they had travelled together that day, two from Leeds, a friend from Leeds who had moved to Luton and a Jamaican guy who had recently arrived in Aylesbury.

The four men caught the Thamesmead train from Luton to London, Kings Cross carrying rucksacks. They looked, said a policeman who has seen CCTV footage from Kings Cross Main Hall as though they were going on a walking holiday, smiling and joking.

They split up, three to die within some 20 minutes, the fourth an eighteen year old, another hour later on a bus where he was sat on the back seat upstairs.

Although one of them owned a spanking new, red Mercedes, they rented a car that they left at Luton before proceeding on to London by train. This is a common method for drug couriers to use as the number plate scanning technology used by the police makes drug couriers very vulnerable to being identified.

At least two had criminal records for petty crime, shop-lifting and fraud and two of the men from Leeds had made a few trips to Pakistan, a well known source of heroin (most of the heroin consumed in Europe and the US comes from Afghanistan and much of it trafficked through Pakistan). And the neighbourhood in Leeds where three of the young men came from is a well-known source for drugs.

If we assume they were simply running what they thought were packets of drugs, they may well have done it before, perhaps even have conducted a ‘dry-run’ or two and of course, ‘ask no questions’, just do the run and pick up the bread.

They are given instructions, perhaps to meet someone on the tube or bus, where they have been instructed to hand over the backpacks, perhaps to look for a pre-arranged signal or sign that identifies the recipient. ‘Drop off the packets and pick up your £1000 when you get back’. Easy-peasy, money for old rope as they say. For four young working class men, the allure of quick, easy money is difficult to resist, the perfect patsies.

Assume therefore, that they thought they were carrying drugs, perhaps picking up the packages in Luton for shipment to London. To reduce the possibility of interception, it is quite common to deliver the drugs separately.

The bombs are actually timed to go off at the height of the rush hour and conveniently, the carriers are all killed. No witnesses, no way of tracing back to who set them up. The police are now saying that their ‘handler’ has in all likelihood, already left the country.

The official story is now that no timers were used but an earlier story released by the police, alleged that timers were used (See ‘Timers Used in Blasts, Police Say; Parallels to Madrid Are Found’). If indeed they were actually suicide bombers, we are asked to accept that regardless of where they were on their respective journeys, at precisely 8:50 am, they were to detonate their bombs.

The Time-line
In order for the official story to be credible, we are asked to accept the following scenario:

They appear to have posed (conveniently) for CCTV cameras at Kings Cross station at 8:30am only 20 minutes before three of the explosions (8:50am) and then managed to find their way to three different locations and detonate their bombs within seconds of each other (the bus bomb doesn’t appear to fit the precise nature of timing of the detonations). And remember that cellphones don’t work on the underground network.

Now assuming they went their separate ways and all caught three different trains immediately to the point where the bombs were detonated, could they have planned to do it in 20 minutes (or less)? The average time between stations on the London underground is 4 minutes (some are less, especially those in the centre of town).

Kings Cross to Aldgate is five stations; Kings Cross to Farringdon, Barbican, Moorgate, Liverpool Street and Aldgate on the Circle Line. The bomb actually went off between Liverpool Street and Aldgate. Could the bombers have had the time to get to the station from the mainline station, wait for a train, and get to the scene in less than twenty minutes (this assumes that after being caught on CCTV, they caught a train immediately).

Russell Square is just one stop on the Piccadilly Line. The bomber had to go down two sets of escalators, wait for a train (it’s one of the deepest tube lines in London).

Edgeware Road is four stops, Kings Cross to Euston Square, Great Portland Street, Baker Street and Edgware Road and also on the Circle line but in the opposite direction.

The bomb on the bus
The police have alleged that the fourth bomber intended to catch a Northern Line train but for some reason switched to the bus (the Northern Line also goes through Kings Cross), so why did he switch? Buses are notoriously irregular and given the almost one hour difference in the time of the bus bomb and the police claim that timing devices appear not have been used, what accounts for the difference? Could it be that something went wrong with the timing device? We’ll probably never know. But it seems strange that the bomb went off on the top of the bus and not on the lower deck where it would have done a lot more damage. The main force of the blast seems to have been upwards and the roof is made of light-weight aluminium, designed to do nothing more than keep the weather out. A photo of the bus taken seconds after the blast shows a lot of people standing on the top deck waiting to get off. If the man, the young Jamaican carrying the bomb was a willing participient, surely he would have positioned himself to do the most damage, downstairs, not upstairs and at the back of the bus?

Police sources have told the BBC they had not recovered any timing devices from the bomb scenes, possibly indicating that detonation was by hand
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4676861.stm

Without timing devices what are the odds of all three bombs actually being in a carriage and detonated at exactly the same time? How would they have been able to synchronise them so precisely and know that they were all in position?

Then we have the ease with which the police identified them. Initially, it was assumed that they were all victims of the bombs, but then they become the culprits (BBC news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4678837.stm). How?

What lead the police to finger the four young men on the CCTV footage? The fact that they all had backpacks or that they were Asian and an African-Caribbean? Anyone familar with London will know that lots of people have those really annoying backpacks that whack you on buses and trains, effectively doubling the space a person takes up.

The BBC story, ‘Bomb investigation far from over’ is adamant that

It is almost inconceivable that the four individuals could have acted by themselves.

A group of apparently unknown, mostly very young men like this, might have the intent to “do something” but having the capability of turning that intent to action would require tapping into broader expertise.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4678807.stm

Whilst I agree that they were used, there is nothing in their backgrounds that suggests any connection with so-called extremists, mosques, rogue Imams or whatever. But we are told that

The best evidence for this comes from the explosives used – high grade plastic explosives which are understood not to have been home-made.

These kind of explosives are hard to get hold of in the UK but far easier to get from abroad, in places such as Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Another source is of course the military and/or security services of any number of countries including the UK.

Most perplexing of all is the fact, admitted by the authorities that the alleged bombers were not on the police’s “radar”. Some reports have suggested that they were ‘sleepers’ but methinks the authors have read too many John le Carré novels?

The authorities have operated on the assumption that the four young men were actually suicide bombers, not dupes, and of course, without the four men to tell their side of the story, it’s all too easy to make the facts fit the theory as it serves the larger ideological objective of the state to present them as ‘fanatics’.

The chain of events therefore seem to point to the fact that the location of the explosions was, to a large degree, pure chance determined only by the instructions given to the four as to where and when to travel to, unaware that it was to be their last trip.

Was it a Mossad Set up?
If the drug running scenario is true there is still the issue of who set them up? One puzzling aspect of the events leading up to the bombings is the story, put out by AP that Binyamin Netanyahu was warned not to leave his hotel room (he was staying at the Great Western Hotel, adjacent to Liverpool Street Station) on the morning of the blasts, the story being pulled later in the day

Report: Israel Was Warned Ahead of First Blast
Arutz Sheva | July 7 2005
(IsraelNN.com) Army Radio quoting unconfirmed reliable sources reported a short time ago that Scotland Yard had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred.

The Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address and [sic] economic summit.

At present, train and bus service in London have been suspended following the series of attacks. No terrorist organization has claimed responsibility at this time.

Israeli officials stress the advanced Scotland Yard warning does not in any way indicate Israel was the target in the series of apparent terror attacks.

Mossad has a well-documented history of using bombings to take out opponents or as provocations and to make it look as if they were carried out by someone else, the last being the assassination of Hariri in Beirut, Lebanon that the UN investigation has revealed was a well-planned assassination with the bomb buried under the road well in advance (see ‘How the bomb was planted’). And, they often employ the use of locals to perform their operations.

Of course none of this can be proved, it is conjecture but given all the circumstances, the backgrounds of the four young men and their movements, the timing of the explosions, and importantly, it accounts for why the police’s account has taken so many twists and turns. Initially, we were told that the bombs were detonated by timers and that no suicide bombers were involved. The change of story makes sense if we assume that the four young men were not aware that they were carrying bombs. The police have taken the evidence and used it to fit a pre-determined scenario.

The government of course is making use of the event to get even more repressive measures passed, and was quick to blame al-Qu’eda and the ‘international terror network’ for the deadly attacks.

_______________________________________________
Mohammed Hanif, 31, and Abdul Mateen, 22, from Deeplish in Rochdale were caught in Glasgow with 10kg of the drug, worth £1 million in street deals. Hanif claimed that Mateen had driven him to Glasgow to collect £500 owed to him for a car by another Asian.

Strathclyde Police drug squad detectives, acting on a tip-off, arrested the pair and found the drugs in a car boot.
news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1162&id=1453462004

William Bowles
- Homepage: http://www.williambowles.info

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