‘7/7 blasts aimed at ruining Olympic bid’

The 7/7 bombings across London’s transport network in 2005 were originally planned to stop the city winning the right to host the 2012 Olympics, according to a Scotland Yard det-ective who investigated the case that involved a Pak-istani-origin Islamist ringleader. 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.

He spoke out for the first time to the Telegraph newspaper after plans for Tablighi Jamaat’s mosque in east London were finally rejected by UK ministers last week. He said that the police had found evidence that the attacks were actually intended to take place 24 hours earlier, in the morning rush hour of July 6, 2005.

He said, “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 did not fit within those parameters. We found text messages sent on July 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.”

The evidence came out at the inquest into the bombings in 2010 but was little reported at the time.

The inquest heard that Pakistani-origin ringleader, Mohammed Sidique Khan, sent a text message to the other bombers at 4.35 am on the 6th saying: “Having major problem. Can not make time. Will ring you when I get it sorted. Wait at home.” Khan’s wife had suffered a miscarriage the previous evening.

Mr Videcette told the newspaper that he believed the morning of July 6, 2005 had been chosen as the original planned date to prevent London winning the 2012 Olympics bid.

The International Olymp-ic Committee was to vote on the host city for the Games that day. IOC members, meeting in Singapore, bega-n voting at 11.26 am UK time, three hours or so after the planned time for the attacks. “Had they detonated those devices on the mo-rning of the 6th, London would not have got the Oly-mpics,” said Mr Videcette.

“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,” he added.

Mr Videcette 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 Dews-bury, West Yorkshire, he said. At the time of the bombings, Tablighi Jamaat was proposing a giant UK headquarters mosque — designed to house as many as 70,000 worshippers — next to the proposed Olymp-ic site in London, he said.

The Games required the compulsory purchase of part of the land earmarked for the mosque, reducing the maximum size of the project.

After London won the Olympics, Tablighi Jamaat re-submitted a proposal for a smaller mosque, for 11,000 worshippers. Its final appeal was refused last week.

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

On the morning of July 7 2005, four Islamist extremists separately detonated three bombs in quick succession aboard London Underground trains across the city and, later, a fourth on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square.

Fifty-two civilians were killed and over 700 more were injured in the attacks, the United Kingdom’s worst terrorist incident since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing as well as the country’s first ever Islamist suicide attack.