20 years since 7/7 London terror attack but UK security risk worse now than it was then

TWENTY years ago today these four men killed themselves and 52 others when they detonated their bombs on three trains and a bus in London in the first Islamist suicide attack on UK soil.

A further 770 people were injured in the 7/7 bombings, which signalled the start of a new era of terrorism in Britain. There is now an ever-present terror threat, and with ever-changing weapons would-be attackers are adapting.

But, in the shadows, MI5 and counter-terror police are surveilling terror cells and lone wolves, building up evidence and striking to prevent attacks.

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They have seen terrorism up close and understand what the public do not see – that evil is out there and another attacker could strike at any time.

Britain's leading security experts have revealed how the UK's security risk is as bad as it was 20 years ago - and in some cases, worse.

As Richard Kemp, a former adviser to the government on terrorism, tells the Mirror today: “Twenty years on, this insidious threat remains with us and will never go away.”

These experts below have seen terrorism up close and have a deep understanding of what the public do not see - that evil is out there and the attackers could strike at any time, here's what they have to say about the state of the threat today:

Colonel Richard Kemp, former adviser to government on terrorism

"Twenty years ago, on 7th July 2005, we saw the most deadly terrorist attack ever committed on UK soil when 52 were killed and 770 wounded. I was chairman of the COBRA Intelligence Group, responsible for coordinating the national intelligence services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ as well as military and police intelligence in support of the UK crisis management committee, chaired by the prime minister. Following 9/11, in which more British people were killed than in any other terrorist attack anywhere, our intelligence efforts against Islamic jihadists had been redoubled.

But nevertheless there had been no warning of the 7/7 attack and many experts believed that a suicide bombing would not take place on British soil, despite the involvement of many British Muslims in a wide range of terrorism outside the UK — including suicide attacks. COBRA met as soon as it became clear that the Underground had been bombed.

The number one priority of the Intelligence Group was to identify any information that might indicate further immediate danger so that any secondary or follow-on attack could be prevented by the police and MI5. Key to that was clearly connections between the terrorists directly involved and any other individuals or networks either in Britain or abroad. That obviously took some time until the terrorists were identified. Then the stops were pulled out and the agencies feverishly drew not only on their own sources but also international intelligence allies.

The London bombings essentially emerged from the importation into the UK of Islamic grievances inside Pakistan, the country of origin of the parents of terrorist ringleader Mohammad Sedique Khan. The conflict in Kashmir especially had been his start point and as his religious fervour grew, he also came under increasing influence from Pakistani mujahideen and supporters of Al Qaeda, both here in Britain and while travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

His pre-7/7 video of course blames British violence against Muslims for his planned attack, while conveniently ignoring the reality of infinitely greater levels of violence against Muslims perpetrated by his own Al Qaida heroes.

The catalogue of jihadist attacks in the UK since 7/7, including the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, horrific though it is, doesn’t come close to the full picture. MI5 and the police constantly monitor thousands of suspects and thankfully have prevented dozens more mass murder plots. Twenty years on this insidious threat remains with us and will never go away."

Major Chris Hunter QGM, ex-SAS bomb disposal expert

"When the 7/7 suicide bombings tore through London’s transport network, I was an Army Major, working for Defence Intelligence and seconded to COBRA, the UK Government’s emergency crisis response committee. For days, I was immersed in intelligence feeds, risk assessments, and the horrific aftermath of an attack on our own streets. That evening I walked home - through a city changed forever - toward my wife and children in Putney, carrying with me the realisation that the frontlines were no longer just overseas.

At that point in my career, I had already served as a bomb disposal officer with the SAS, disarming IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’d trained for years for an incident like this, but 7/7 brought the reality home: the enemy no longer needed to cross borders. The war could be brought to us, through ideology, radicalisation, and cunning ingenuity.

Since then, the threat has evolved - mutated, even. Where once it was crude homemade devices in backpacks, it’s now 3D-printed components, encrypted planning apps, and lone actors radicalised online from bedrooms thousands of miles away. The accessibility of lethal technology is greater than ever. The barriers to entry are lower. The ideology, tragically, is still thriving.

For the past ten years, I’ve worked as a humanitarian Explosive Ordnance Disposal operator in conflict zones across the world - Libya, Syria, Iraq – where my colleagues and I are saving lives and denying terrorists the weapons they leave behind. We’ve cleared thousands of IEDs: everything from Daesh ’s suicide belts to booby-trapped schools and hospitals.

I’ve seen, and continue to see first-hand how this threat doesn't just persist - it adapts. And it doesn't respect borders. I’m writing this from another conflict zone in the Middle East. And the hard truth is this: while the faces and factions may change, the tactics don’t. We must remain vigilant - not paranoid, but prepared. We must invest in intelligence, prevention, and resilience. Because terrorism never sleeps. And neither should we. They only have to be lucky once; we have to be lucky always."

Colonel Hamish De-Bretton Gordon, chemical and biological weapons expert

"At the time of 7/7, 20 years ago I was commanding the UK’s Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear Regiment and was on operations in Iraq. We were dealing with a potential al-Qaeda biological weapon attack against British troops in southern Iraq. Had 7/7 been a CBRN attack, God only knows what the death toll might have been.

I saw up close the terror state of Assad’s Syria, killing thousands of civilians with the deadly nerve agent Sarin, but also with readily available chlorine. When I was fighting with the Peshmerga against ISIS, 2015-17, the terrorists frequently fired mortars at us full of mustard agent aka mustard gas. ISIS also tried to obtain highly enriched uranium to make an improvised nuclear device which could have devastated whole towns and villages. The offspring of the jihadists of 7/7 have tried and so far, failed to devastate the hated West with some form of CBRN attack.

It is not just the terrorists who view this type of attack as the ‘gold’ standard, but also tyrants and rogue states. The dictator of North Korea had his stepbrother assassinated with the nerve agent VX, and my hometown of Salisbury was attacked by Russian hitmen on the orders of Putin himself, with Novichok, the deadliest chemical man has ever produced.

There was enough Novichok used in the attack to kill half the population of Salsibury. It seems every terrorist, dictator, despot and rogue state sees CBRN as morbidly brilliant weapons, but there is mitigation to every threat, and it is the one that is ignored or put in the too difficult bracket, that will cause us serious harm. However, we in this country are fortunate to have the brilliant MI5 and MI6, the counter-terror police, the SAS and many other agencies that keep us safe in our beds and will continue to do so if we support and fund them properly."

Peter Clarke, former head of counter-terrorism, Scotland Yard

"It’s the only time we’ve had this scale of multiple attacks, in the capital, targeting innocent members of the public. Lockerbie saw far greater loss of life but there were different things about this one. It turned out it was British citizens killing and injuring their own citizens, on and under the streets of London. Unprecedented. You have to ask yourself, what did they achieve? It’s been 20 years now. All that pain and suffering they caused, and death, what did they actually achieve by that?”

What has changed is that we adapted the way we worked after 9/11 to the different threat posed by the Islamist groups as opposed to the Irish paramilitaries. That involved MI5 and the police working much more closely together than they ever had before to try and capture these people at the planning stages or as early as possible before they killed too many people.

Their ambition was to kill as many people as possible, which the Irish hadn’t because they were part of a political process. So we found a new way of working where lots of material that MI5 had gathered became available to us as evidence and that enabled us to intervene earlier, in some cases.

The closeness of that relationship made it increasingly difficult for Al Qaeda to operate large terrorist networks. You had 7/7, then the transatlantic airline plot in 2006 and the last network was the NHS doctors who attacked Haymarket and then Glasgow Airport in 2007.

What had happened by then is that it became too difficult for large networks to operate in this country. It’s around that time that Al Qaeda changed its tactics and said that individual terrorists could choose their target and their timing. In the past these networks had had to be centrally authorised by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That was certainly the case with 7/7.

So the method of launching terrorist attacks has changed since then. There is obviously a huge terrorist threat.”