7/7 bombings ‘were aimed at Olympic bid’

From the Sunday Telegraph. I always wondered whether it was pure co-incidence – the two events the same week. I did not want London to be put to the expense and upheaval of the Olympics and the loss of what had been a huge manufacturing site. I wanted it redeveloped, not as a pleasure park after 3 weeks of televised PE but as a hub of the British manufacturing industry. After the bombing for a period I did not expect the Olympics to take place; I expected civil unrest such as to scupper the plan. I was wrong about that. But it looks like my other musings were shared.  

A Scotland Yard detective at the heart of the 7/7 bombings inquiry says he believes the attacks were originally planned to stop London winning the right to host the Olympics.

David Videcette, a former officer with the Anti-Terrorist Squad who worked on the bombings investigation for five years, said derailing the Olympic bid would also have helped protect a fundamentalist sect’s project to build Europe’s biggest mosque. “We started out by believing motives for 7/7 were international terrorism, but gradually as we went through it we came up with lots of information that didn’t fit within those parameters,” he said. “What if we were wrong? What if the motives were actually far more locally based, and we missed them?” 

Mr Videcette spoke out for the first time to the Telegraph after plans for the mosque, now reduced in size, were finally rejected by ministers last week. He said police had found evidence that the attacks were actually intended to take place 24 hours earlier, in the morning rush hour of July 6.

“We found text messages sent on the 6th delaying the attack and we found CCTV of two of the bombers buying ice really early on the morning of the 6th, to cool down their prepared bombs,” he said.

The evidence was publicly aired at the inquest into the bombings in 2010, but little reported at the time. 

Mr Videcette said he believed the morning of the 6th had been chosen as the original planned date to prevent London winning the 2012 Olympics bid. 

“Had they detonated those devices on the morning of the 6th, London would not have got the Olympics,More recently I have realised that the two lead bombers’ travel dates when travelling to and from Pakistan to learn how to make bombs closely corresponded to the Olympic bidding process dates when the London bid was officially lodged and when the IOC visited to audit London as a host city.”

Mr Videcette, who spent much of his time during the investigation in Khan’s native West Yorkshire, said he believed that the proposed timing of the attacks was related to Khan’s role with the fundamentalist and separatist Muslim sect, Tablighi Jamaat. Khan and another of the bombers worshipped at the main Tablighi Jamaat headquarters mosque in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

He said: “When you look at the combination of the attackers being followers of Tablighi Jamaat and potentially targeting the Olympics, I then came to ask the question, ‘What would a rogue Tablighi Jamaat adherent gain from London not getting the Olympics?’” 

“I am not accusing the Tablighi Jamaat leadership or the trustees of the mosque of involvement in 7/7,” said Mr Videcette, who has written a novel about the bombings, The Theseus Paradox.

“But the investigation did find clear links between the bombers and other TJ figures who appear to have had a clear interest in the large mosque being completed.

“These were leaders who exercise enormous control over the large and ghettoised Tablighi Jamaat community in Yorkshire. I believed they wanted to create a similar community and extend a similar arrangement to London. They didn’t want the Olympics because it would have made it more difficult to realise those plans.”

Khan and Tanweer did record videos, aired after the bombings, praising al-Qaeda and edited to include footage of Osama bin Laden’s then deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

They are also believed to have had some contact with al-Qaeda figures when they travelled to Pakistan in 2004-5.

However, security officials have always been cautious about making any direct links between the bombers and al-Qaeda. Mr Videcette said security services told him that it was “assessed not to be an al-Qaeda attack”.