Overview
At 08:49 on 7 July 2005, three bombs detonated within fifty seconds of each other on London Underground trains near Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square. A fourth went off on the upper deck of a number 30 bus in Tavistock Square just under an hour later. Fifty-two people were killed and more than seven hundred injured. The four men who carried the devices — Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Germaine Lindsay — died in the explosions.
The scale of the attack was established within days. How the government described it was not, and the gap between the two is where most of the doubt about the official account has lived ever since.
The Timetable That Did Not Exist
The Home Office narrative published in May 2006 stated that the bombers had travelled from Luton to King's Cross on a train departing at 07:40. Researchers checking the account against Thameslink's own records found that the 07:40 service had been cancelled that morning. The narrative was subsequently corrected to a 07:25 departure.
The error was small in itself, and the government treated it as a clerical matter. For people already uneasy about the absence of a public inquiry, it read differently: the state's single authoritative account of the morning had been written without checking a railway timetable, and had gone unchallenged until members of the public did the checking.
The Theory
From this grew a broader argument that the official account was assembled rather than investigated. Its proponents point to the initial reluctance to hold any public inquiry at all, the reliance on a narrative document rather than sworn testimony, and the fact that no CCTV footage of the four men together at Luton was released for years. Some go further, holding that the men were participants in an exercise they did not understand, or that the devices were placed rather than carried.
The most cited supporting detail is a coincidence of that morning: a company called Visor Consultants was running a crisis exercise for a private client based on simultaneous bombs at the same stations. Its managing director, Peter Power, described it on television that evening. Nothing in the subsequent inquiries connected the exercise to the attack, but its existence is a matter of record and it recurs in almost every retelling.
The Inquest
The fullest public examination did not begin until October 2010, when Lady Justice Hallett sat as coroner. Over nineteen weeks the inquests heard 309 witnesses and received a further 197 written statements. In May 2011 she returned verdicts of unlawful killing on all fifty-two victims, and found that the injuries were such that each would have died regardless of how quickly help had reached them. She stated that the evidence did not justify the conclusion that failings by any organisation or individual had caused or contributed to any of the deaths, and issued nine recommendations directed at future risk.
The Intelligence and Security Committee had reported separately in May 2006. It confirmed that MI5 had encountered Khan and Tanweer on the edges of another investigation and had assessed them as peripheral, and it attributed the failure to pursue them to resource pressure and competing priorities rather than to any decision about the men themselves.
What It Established
Two things sit alongside each other in the record. The inquest was thorough and adversarial, with families' counsel able to question the security service directly, and it found no cover-up. And the state's first public account of the day contained an error that any member of the public could disprove with a timetable, which it did not correct until that member of the public did so.
The second fact does not establish the first was dishonest. It does explain why an account issued without cross-examination, about an event of this size, struggled to settle the question for everyone — and why the five-year wait for sworn evidence is itself part of the story.