The Web of Evil

I’ll be honest: I was getting a little jittery. The only sign of activity recently had been the anniversary release of a tape of Shehzad Tanweer, another of the 7 July bombers, regurgitating the usual blah about why God wanted him to pull the ripcord, this time with a director’s commentary by Al Qaeda’s own Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who mentioned Tanweer’s “enthusiasm for PE and sport”. Nothing else on the radar, though. To give the cliché its due, it really was too quiet.

And it looks as if that was precisely because something was brewing. Recent intelligence-led operations have left us feeling understandably sceptical about what we’re told, but I really don’t think the security services have precipitated all this just to get attention. (Again with the passenger jets—is there a verse where God condemns flying? 29. The wrong-doers leap into the air, and rejoice (that) they do so. We will strike them down, for the air is Satan’s domain. Note to v.29: According to the Prophet, “in the air” is classified as “anything taller than me”.)

Credit where it appears to be due; I spend enough time on here berating the security services when they get it wrong and then take cover from any comeback behind the words “national security”. (It’s the second part that grates even more than the first, in truth; I strongly believe, not least because of its frequent application to my own life, that “it’s not the fucking up, it’s the making good”. Though, that said, I’ve never actually shot a Brazilian man in the face, and I’m not about to try—after all, who could live with the omnipresent threat of being prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive?) So: the police seem to have genuinely stopped in its tracks an advanced plan to detonate a bunch of airliners, possibly over cities, for the glorification of an apparently psychotic God. If they have, they’ve done a great job, but of course we won’t know the truth behind this craziness for months.

I’m quite pleased that the arresting and cordoning-off isn’t going on around me this time, but again East London is in the thick of it. I lived in Leytonstone in the late 1990s, and given that your late teens and early twenties is the perfect time for your brain to be diverted towards one-track idiot radicalism—religious, political, even artistic—I wonder how many of the kids I used to pass in the street back then have since become would-be martyrs and “good Muslims”. I also wonder how difficult it is not to get sucked into that mindset if all around you many of your peers are becoming radicalised. Distrustful, heavy-handed police on one side, and on the other fervent nutters with the gleam of God in their eye: I wouldn’t be an ethnic Asian Muslim teenager in London right now for all the sultanas in heaven.

I suggest a new word for kids who dream of emulating terrorists but haven’t the faintest idea what they’re doing: terrorettes.


I left my flat at about 1.15 yesterday to discover a world of police vans and fluttering cordons. As I rounded the nearest van and saw the entire road cleared of traffic and filled with about 70 police in full dayglo, I began to realise that I was smack bang inside the cordoned area. The police stared at me as I walked, unnerved, down the centre of the street, in my own pocket-sized that-bit-in-Vanilla-Sky moment. Eventually one of them had the wit to call me over, and we were able to establish that I was merely a confused resident and the bag slung around my shoulder only contained books. We also established that there was no way on God's earth that I was going to be allowed back to my flat.

I went into a web café down the road, checked what little news there was, posted my rather bewildered comment, and then had to leave as we were evacuated further down the street. This happened twice more, as buildings were cleared and the crowd swelled, until we were fully half a mile down the road, my block now completely out of sight.

I spent three hours at that police cordon, wondering uselessly if I was suddenly going to see a plume of smoke where Oval tube—and my flat—used to be. We were told precisely nothing. After a while we began to hope they weren't setting up a controlled explosion, but checking the site for any traces of chemical agents, or indeed of the terrorette. People following the news knew long before us that the attacks seemed to be a lame copycat effort, with only one injury. As elements of the story filtered through to us—the small detonations, the attempt to replicate the exact pattern of the previous bombings including the fuck-up on the bus, the fact that these particular “jihadis” apparently didn’t want to die—it became clear that it wasn’t nearly as bad as we’d feared, or as it actually could have been. The moment this became a certainty was when I saw the Channel 4 News anchorwoman sitting near me turn to her colleague and say “England are 39 for 5!”

I don’t know at exactly what time the cordons around my house were removed, because I went to the Palace of Westminster and got drunk. strictlytrue was already there, and kindly offered to let me sleep over at his (thank you again to you and yours), but the nightbus route we took happens to pass by mine, and we found that the flat was now unsurrounded. Words truly can’t express how it felt to be back home, having possibly had to wave the bloody thing goodbye twelve hours earlier.


So: the little fuckers who did this are still at large. Everyone who was arrested, or even suspected, has been released. For all that police are saying that the devices were similar to the ones used in the earlier attack, though, it’s clear that something was a little different about this one. The terrorettes’ apparent variety of methods for trying to detonate the bombs, for example, similar only in their failure to work. Is it really conceivable that this is the same group, but they’ve run out of actual detonators?

Then there's the fact, as I mentioned, that this lot demonstrated absolutely no desire to be Islamikazes, while apparently trying to make the death of Hasib Hussain slightly less ignominious by making out that he’d intended to bomb that bus after all. The fact remains, though, that an 18-year-old kid, memorialised by those who knew him as a "dork", managed to blow up a bus by accident, while this bloke yesterday couldn't even do it on purpose.

The police are, laudably, saying they’re keeping an open mind about who did this. It could be a rival group to the one that sent its idiot warriors to die in London a fortnight ago, one less inclined to suicide; they might not even be sympathisers, but people acting as agents provocateurs. Or perhaps it was a sarcastic impression of the original attacks.

Right now, I don’t care. I only know one thing: my home is still standing, and I’m in it.