Review of the year: London Bombings

In July, a cycle of violence instructive enough to seem, even after this brief passage of time, like a mythical tale rather than an actual chain of events, struck London. It began in earnest when four young men met in the capital and carried out a long-predicted attack on the city. Their actions unleashed death and carnage, exactly as the four had planned.

The citizens of London responded with fear and with trepidation, and also with anger and defiance. Four of them, though, were ashamed that others had taken action when they had not. These four had been planning their own violent protest, and duly set out two weeks later to commit a copycat crime, eager to redraw the "pattern of the cross" that the first group of terrorists had etched around the capital. They managed to kill not a soul, not even themselves. Instead they escaped into the streets of the city, inspiring a massive and hysterical manhunt. That second, botched attack, led directly to one further death.

Jean Charles de Menezes was held down on a train at Stockwell Tube station and repeatedly shot by a police officer the morning after the second attack. Despite the rumour and innuendo that for days swirled around his death, implying that he had in some way courted his fate, this young Brazilian had been innocent of any crime, and even of any behaviour that might have led a law enforcer sensibly to draw the mistaken conclusion that he was.

Perhaps, even without this further, grotesque tragedy, London would have recovered just as fully from the fear unleashed by the actions of Mohammed Siddique Khan and the three younger men - Shahzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Germaine Lindsay - who launched the first attack with him. But I think that the death of Jean Charles - so brutal, so senseless, so inexcusable - sobered us up, and illustrated all too obviously where naked fear could take us.

Now, less than six months on from the attack that we had dreaded for years, London seems entirely to have absorbed and accepted the horror that unfolded on 7 July. Such attacks are one of the risks of life in the city, to be placed on the seething lists of pros and cons that make London such a dizzying place to live. This has been true for many years now, not just since the cult of the suicide bomber began to grow and spread. Those, such as myself, who had no personal link to the people who suffered and died in the 7 July bombings, but who got on with their lives in the city against this unfolding drama, were able to afford themselves the luxury of narcissism. On the morning of the attacks, as Londoners gradually woke up to the fact that there had been no power surge, but instead that a number of bombs had been detonated, the mobile phone networks collapsed. This fed the fears of Londoners, but in fact they were overloaded by the weight of hysteria's equivalent of the "worried well".

People contacted loved ones who might have had an infinitesimal chance of being involved, seeking reassurance. When I called my friend John, who worked at King's Cross, he was merely irritated. "You know I haven't used the Tube since Madrid," he snapped. At schools all over town, parents turned up demanding that their children be handed over. One schoolgirl I spoke to said that the teachers were telling them nothing, but that parents were texting their offspring and setting off whispering campaigns. Rumours far more lurid than the already quite lurid enough reality were fizzing and banging through the building, creating a level of panic that was utterly unnecessary.

The streets, in the first hours, were silent, as were the people marching along them, clutching their phones in their fists. The buses drifted back to their depots, empty, all heading in the same direction like migrating creatures acting on instinct. Londoners acted on instinct, too, and headed, if they could, for the nearest telly. It was the shock, of course, that made it all seem so unreal, like a spectacle we could watch, open-mouthed. In those eerie early hours, London seemed to be engulfed in a cloying soup of silence. People were not emerging from the tunnels, so we knew how bad it had been.

Later, those underground in the trains when the explosions happened spoke of a chilling period of silence before the screaming began. This same effect, vastly attenuated, happened to the whole of London.

The sirens started across the city - police, fire, ambulance - and they didn't stop, day and night, for ages, one shrill whine fading as another rose. For the next few days and weeks there was a rising cacophony of information, too, saturating the media and being greedily absorbed by viewers, readers, listeners, even though, very strangely, people just didn't talk much about all that was happening. Unless, of course, they were in the teensy minority who had really been involved in the bombs.

First, those who had had miraculous escapes began to speak - like the man who had got off the bus, but who had noticed an agitated youth dipping again and again into his rucksack. Then, those whose loved ones were missing began to speak - the man whose Israeli girlfriend had been talking to him from the bus in Tavistock Square when he heard what he later learned was the bomb that killed her. Gradually we were allowed to hear the awful gory details - of human flesh hanging from the buildings near the bus, or of people, lying in the dark, slowly coming to the realisation that their legs or their arms were missing. Photographs of suffering began to appear. Some of them, with the casual stupidity that nowadays is conferred upon a certain list of tiresomely overused words, were shortly afterwards declared "iconic". Londoners declared they they were "not scared", by placing graphic renditions of these defiant words on a website. In reality though, public transport use had plummeted, bikes were selling like Stella McCartney at H&M, and people were seriously considering getting out for good. Any vaguely Semitic man on a bus was surrounded by a mandala of hostile space. Anybody at all whose circumstances made it necessary to carry a bulky item on the Tube was treated like a sick sadist out solely to deliver his own little morsel of psychological terror.

At the same time, the identities of the bombers were being pieced together. Friends of the young men spoke of their bewilderment, their disbelief. Families spoke of their misplaced relief that their wild Western boys had found the steadying influence of religious study. We saw the humdrum pictures of them on their way to cause this mayhem, three out of four British-born, the gentle man who would emerge as the ringleader working as a teaching assistant, expecting a second baby in the weeks after his murderous suicide. Facts and fictions established themselves quickly - some of the men had been banned from their local mosque and had met instead in the street outside, or in the local fundamentalist gym, or in the video shop that routinely rented film of atrocities against Muslims. Much was written about local poverty on the streets of Leeds, and the failure of multiculturalism. It was pointed out that several of the men came originally from among a peasant tribe in Pakistan, who had been exploited and abandoned in Britain, to become the least skilled and employed * ethnic minority in England. Gradually, though, the facts got in the way of this good story. It became abundantly clear that the primary grievance of these young men was the invasion of Iraq. Siddique Khan, particularly, had wholly embraced Western life, prior to his politicisation. He had become convinced that there was a worldwide war against Muslims, endorsed and manipulated by the West. Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq - these were the issues that inspired these people to such acts of cruelty.

Even by the time of the second attack, two Thursdays after the first, London was already getting the bombings into perspective. Mentioning that they had occurred, and that the suspects had fled, to Guy's dad in the playground at school pick-up time, he shrugged, unconcerned. "That's just idiots isn't it, doing some kind of copycat thing?" I didn't feel so relaxed myself. One of the putative bombers had fled from Oval Tube station, much nearer to my home than any of the other attacks. The fugitive's distinctive sweatshirt had been found not far away. We saw their faces, too, and hoped that they'd soon be caught. The sirens, which had not ceased for a fortnight, became more insistent than ever. Homes were raided, people arrested, bomb factories pinpointed. Was any of this stuff true? Who knew what was going on. In many ways the idea of these desperate men being on the loose was more frightening than the idea that you might, one day, be unlucky on the Underground, in a different way to the previous bouts of accidental bad luck that have taken the lives of other Londoners in fires or crashes before.

A neighbour told me the next morning that a man had been cornered at Stockwell Tube station, a few hundred yards away. I flicked on the telly, and there was the neighbourhood, taped off, and presented by professionals who knew nothing whatsoever. Incredibly slowly, eyewitnesses turned up again, relating as gospel their garbled fictions or their breathless assumptions of mistaken identity. A picture emerged, convincing but entirely untrue. A man had been shot dead as he tried to escape from police officers, wearing a heavy suspicious coat on a hot day, and vaulting the ticket barrier when challenged. The police had followed the rules of "Operation Kratos", a shoot-to-kill policy that the taxpayer didn't even know they'd adopted, based on the experience of the Israeli police. The long, fraught morning wore on, without any solid confirmation from the police that they had indeed got their man. This was enough in itself to confirm to most observers that they had, in their panic, killed an innocent civilian.

The lies and obfuscations of the coming days were quite, quite appalling. Now, the man in charge, Sir Ian Blair, has asked that it be made clear that none of the false and incriminating stories about Jean Paul's death actually came from his lips. He simply took his time in refuting them. The local police were more honest, coming to face the people of the area head on, in a faith meeting held at the community centre behind the Tube station.

Many wise words were said at this meeting, and it was my privilege there to meet Toaha Qureshi, a Muslim community leader based at the Stockwell Green Mosque. Here, Qureshi has been working for years to combat the sort of absolutist interpretation of Islam and of the modern world that he feels infects young people to become martyrs. He also, some time back, wrote to the police, naming one of the people who was eventually arrested as a London bomber. Neither back then, nor since the events of the early summer, has he received a visit from the police at all. On the day I visited him, Gordon Brown had just flown home from Palestine, minutes after touching down, in order to vote with the Government to support the police in their wish to hold people without charge for three months under suspicion of terrorist-related activity. Londoners have shown that they know how to keep terrorism in proportion. What a shame that the police and the politicians are not so sophisticated as the people they govern.