Chill of the hunt for 7/7 terrorists

An unsettling documentary series on the deadly 2005 London bombings forensically examines how the tragic events unfolded.

A scene from Attack on London: Hunting The 7/7 Bombers.

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It’s just over 20 years ago that four co-ordinated attacks were carried out by Islamist terrorists targeting commuters travelling on London’s packed public transport network during the morning rush hour.

It was about 8.50am, three blasts happening in the vicinity of Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square stations.

The fourth device exploded at 9.47am on a No.30 double-decker bus that had been diverted via Tavistock Square.

The attack resulted in the deaths of 52 people and nearly 800 injuries.

All four of the bombers were under the age of 30 and three were British-born sons of Pakistani parents from the Beeston and Holbeck areas of Leeds.

And as the new Netflix series Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers demonstrates, tracking them down was like an episode of a British thriller.

It was full of dread and anxiety. Despite us knowing the outcome, the hunt was suspenseful as no one knew if the bombers might strike again. The authorities were under the extreme tension of expecting another terror attack.

Originally thought to be a giant electrical failure on the London underground, it was the deadliest terrorist attack in the UK since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 near Lockerbie, when plastic explosive, concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player, detonated in the forward cargo hold inside a Samsonite case.

The series examines the tragic events in forensic and meticulous detail, and it’s fascinating, graphic and unsettling.

Across four thoroughly detailed episodes, shot and edited in a highly cinematic fashion, the series also immersively follows the way the initial attacks unfolded.

And it does it in a painstaking, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day approach, a ubiquitous time graphic ticking off the moments.

It also unblinkingly looks at the attempted bombings that occurred two weeks later, on July 21, and the following manhunt that followed for the perpetrators.

Chillingly recreated is the way an innocent 27-year-old Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, who had been erroneously identified as a suspect, was mistakenly shot by police.

Appallingly, the Metropolitan Police at the time were in full denial as to culpability, determined to protect their reputation.

27-year-old Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, had been erroneously identified as a suspect.

The perspective of the victims is never lost, returning us constantly to a group who were injured and their stories of how they have coped in the past 20 years. There are interviews with the Prime Minister Tony Blair, then Home Secretary Charles Clarke, Eliza Manningham-Buller, then director general of MI5, and key members of the police investigation team, also still dealing with the repercussions.

The politicians, while not entirely convincing, at least have the courage to face some hard questions, though Manningham-Buller is stiff and stoically evasive. One of the big questions asked by the series is just what did MI5 know and what could have been done to prevent the attacks?

The series is directed by Adam Wishart, a renowned documentary filmmaker (he was director of the BBC’s 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room) and his colleague Jim Nally, also a multiple award-winning documentary series director and producer. Both are now connected to the industrious production company, The Slate Works, which produced this series. (Its company moto: “They build audiences, capture headlines and get people talking.”)

Their editor is the award-winning Danny Collins, who cut Wishart’s 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room. “The essence of cinema is editing,” Francis Ford Coppola said. “It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.”

And that’s what Collins achieves in this visually striking documentary. He creates a palpable, immersive sense of fear, alarm and confusion as he cuts together snippets of interviews, phone pictures and video bits, archival footage, reconstructions of key moments, sound grabs, TV commentary and still photographs.

The beginning, including the titles sequence, is especially arresting. The screen fills with a huge explosion and we hear the voice of one of the bombers. “I want to talk to you in a language you will understand. We are at war. You will be our targets. We will fight with our blood,” he says in a recording. Then a montage follows of dates, shots of trains, people crowded together on the underground platforms, and shadowy surveillance camera shots of several men entering a tunnel carrying large backpacks. It’s a distressing opening.

“We called it Three Weeks in July for a while,” Wishart says in an interview with Deadline. “The framing was extraordinary. Twenty years after the event was the first time we could access this because people were willing to talk about it in a way they couldn’t before. We still have survivors [in the doco] because you can’t understand what’s going on without the full 360, but we wanted to know what our public officials do in a moment of crisis.”

The survivors’ stories are heart wrenching, beginning with Daniel Biddle who lost his legs in the Edgware Road explosion and was thrown onto the train tracks. “In my head I was going ‘What the f--k?’ ” he says. “Dust and dirt was in the air, in your teeth and hitting your tongue, and then you’d hear one voice, and then another, and then another. I’d never hear screams like this; I could see the carnage around me. It was like opening the gates of hell.”

In such tragic circumstances, Britain under attack by these bombers, Wishart says one major question compelled his investigations into the bloodbath: What is the purpose of public authorities?

“If the state’s aim is to try to keep one’s citizens safe then clearly it failed,” he says. “And in the minutes following, what is the role of the public servant? That was the question that drove this series.”

Distrust in public authorities remains high, he suggests, with the shooting of de Menezes acting as a “key moment, an inflection point,” but Wishart says his series could help humanise those at the coalface of these generational crises.

“I think as citizens it is too easy to think that public institutions are like a black box, and inside the black box are carefully engineered and beautifully honed cogs that are all whirring with great efficiency,” he adds.

“It is more difficult to imagine that inside these institutions are human beings who are mostly trying to do their best and sometimes have human flaws. The role of a doc-maker is to try and demonstrate the humanness of these institutions and what is going on behind the front door.”

And his access behind that door is extraordinary, his privileged entry allowing him to recreate the police investigation, the largest in UK history, which provides the focus for his four episodes. He shows how the police were initially dumbfounded by the attacks until explosives expert Cliff Todd was able to show the bombers had used a mixture of concentrated hydrogen peroxide, bleach used in hair dye and crushed black pepper in their main charges.

The series suggests Netflix is moving away from those shiny, exploitative true crime documentaries focusing on cops and serial killers and looking more at problems faced by society as a whole – those stories of government malfeasance, institutional ineptitude and corporate gluttony.

Series like this one and the recent Grenfell: Uncovered, a poignant piece of crusading journalism about a building fire that killed dozens of innocent people, suggest a post-true crime moment has arrived.

Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers streaming on Netflix.