by Cliff Todd
Now I can’t even begin to describe the list of rules and regulations and general health and safety procedures that we in FEL, at my behest, had ridden absolutely roughshod over and stamped into the dirt, during this whole episode. I can only say that it was an absolutely crazy time, for the FEL, the police, and throughout senior levels of government, and we, along with everyone else, were just doing the best we could to deal with an absolutely unprecedented situation, under enormous pressure. And my own management, either by design or accident, but I’ll give them the benefit and say by design, were keeping the lowest of low profiles, which as things worked out, was absolutely the most helpful thing they could do. To be fair, my immediate boss had spoken to me earlier, and said that whatever I needed, I only had to ask, and that he would otherwise just let us all get on with what we needed to do.
23 – 31 July
OK. Maybe time to draw a breath and have a slight change of focus. So far it’s mostly been about all the rushing about in the outside world, reacting to one urgent incident after another. Now it’s probably worth a look at what’s been going on within the lab, which after all is our (FEL staff) normal environment. And in a lab sort of way, it was really just as hectic, but that is rather more difficult to convey than when rushing around in the outside world. Still, I’ll give it a go.
With the 7/7 bombings, we had been starting to get a bit of a handle on what we were dealing with, and what our priorities within the lab were. These were basically: What was the explosive main charge? What was the detonator? How were they delivered? How were they triggered? Were they all the same? Anything like them ever seen before? In the UK? Worldwide? If they are completely new devices, where did the technology come from? Is it just one small isolated group, or part of a larger, directed conspiracy? Finding and preserving material suitable for other disciplines, such as fingerprints and DNA.
Of course, with all the material from the Leeds bomb factory, and the Luton Station car, we had a good deal of information to work with, but that still all needed to be positively linked to the actual bombings – because at this point that was still just a working assumption. And this work takes a great deal of time. You have a huge amount of debris, some of which will be very significant, but much of which won’t. And since you don’t know which is which to start with, you have to actually look at it all, or at least a great deal of it, to get at the really significant stuff. Then you have to examine those bits very closely, and with a variety of tests, to end up with actual concrete evidence, as opposed to simple assumptions, all of which takes a long time. (This is where reality and TV programmes head off in diametrically opposite directions. On TV, people immediately pick up the only and crucial bits of evidence, wave them at a machine or two, and that’s job done. If only.)
Now, up until the 21st, particularly after the first ten days or so, the urgency in the lab was slightly tempered by the fact that there were no suspects in custody, and it was starting to look like there weren’t going to be, or at least not as main players, only as peripheral offenders, if at all. Then when 21/7 happened, that slight sense of light at the end of the tunnel went right out the window. Now we knew there were going to be prisoners, probably very soon, which meant we needed to get evidence very urgently for the police to be able to charge and remand them. And prisoners there were, I can’t remember exactly when, but certainly by 27 July.
Well, the first question now (for both ourselves and the police) was: is this now one investigation or two? Are the 21/7 bombers part of the same group as the 7/7 ones, or are they different? We in the lab still had very little to go on, but we were able to tell the police that the material from the 21/7 devices, although similar, was not the same mixture as that from Leeds (and hence by assumption, the 7/7 bombs). This, combined with the information the police had from their own investigation, led them to decide that they were two separate investigations, which from our point of view made things logistically somewhat easier. The police (well the Met anyway) always give major investigations an operation name. In the past, those names always had some connection, however obscure, to the investigation they related to; a DC of my acquaintance once famously (infamously?) remarked, after an incident in Mincing Street in London, that he would have nothing to do with any investigation called Operation Mincing! Which has nothing to do with anything, but it made me smile at the time. In any event, those days were gone, and names were now produced randomly. And so, 7/7 had been named Operation Theseus, and initially, 21/7 had been kept the same. However, it now became Operation Vivace. Followed, obviously, with lots of debate about how it should be pronounced – choose your own!
Anyway, it made it easier for us in the lab, because we could select out all the Theseus exhibits, and put them on the back burner for the time being, and just concentrate on the Vivace ones – still in the hundreds. There were two main strands to the lab work at this time; one to decide definitively whether these materials could detonate; and one to try and find traces of the detonator explosive.
To have to prove that a main charge in a device is actually an explosive was quite unusual for us. Generally, the materials used are already recognised explosives, and as such, courts will accept that without it needing to be proved again and again. However, when something completely new comes along, it has to be proved to the satisfaction of a court that the material will definitely explode, under the right conditions. And what we were dealing with in both 7/7 and 21/7 was definitely new.
Well, it’s not necessarily as simple as it might sound. We did have a test which we could use in the lab, called a cartridge case test. This involves putting about two grams of the test substance into a cartridge (bullet) case, putting a detonator in contact with it, and firing the detonator. The resulting damage to the cartridge case is then compared with the damage caused by a known inert material, such as sand, and a range of other known explosives. This is generally a very good and reliable test, but it does have its limitations, the major one being the size of the sample. Two grams is fine for most commercial explosives, but for many improvised explosives this is at or below the size threshold at which they will properly detonate. Added to which, the samples we had to do the test on had probably changed noticeably from the time they were made and/or used, to when we tested them. All of which meant that we were getting inconsistent and debatable results from this test. And we had got rid of most of the bulk material, because of its unpredictable and very reactive behaviour. So we were struggling with this.
As regards the detonator explosive, perhaps some scene setting might be helpful. High explosives come in two basic forms, primary and secondary. Secondary explosives need a shock wave to make them detonate, generally supplied by a detonator, and are used in large quantities as the main charge. Primary explosives are very sensitive and will detonate readily from various stimuli such as shock, heat, friction, spark, etc. Hence they are used in small quantities, such as in detonators, to provide a shock to detonate a much larger quantity of secondary explosives. It was our working assumption at this point that what had happened with the 21/7 devices was that the detonators had worked properly and exploded, but for unknown reasons they had failed to detonate the main charges. This was based on our own observation of the damage to the devices and the rucksacks they were in, and on witness testimony from people present at the time – there had been a quite loud bang, smoke, torn-open rucksacks on the floor, and in at least one case, the perpetrator had been knocked off his feet.
In the UK, detonators are very tightly controlled and difficult to come by, so if you want to make a bomb using high explosives, in the absence of a commercial detonator, you have to make your own primary explosive. By far the most practical two candidates for this are called HMTD and TATP (hexamethylene-triperoxide-diamine and triacetone-triperoxide for the technophiles).
Now, here I am going to try and simplify things a bit. Detonators are also sometimes called initiators. And they can come in different sizes, t
he chosen size being dependent on how sensitive the main charge is. The less sensitive the main charge is, the larger the initiator must be to detonate it. So in the rest of this narrative I will only refer to initiators, not detonators, and I will only refer to the size of initiator as small, medium or large. This is a fairly gross over-simplification, but it is convenient and sufficient for the purposes of the narrative.
Well, we had methods of testing for traces (i.e. amounts invisible to the naked eye) of both HMTD and TATP. However, at that time, we couldn’t test for both at the same time – and to change the system from one to the other took at least a day to do, during which time no testing could take place at all. So we had to choose one or the other. Since we now knew that HMTD was present in the Leeds flat, that was the obvious choice, and we had been starting to find some traces of HMTD amongst the 7/7 debris. All blank so far amongst the 21/7 materials, which were now the most important ones, but these were early days – we had a huge number of samples to test, both from the debris, and now also from the suspects, their clothing and their premises.
And then on 23 July a fifth device had been found, abandoned in Little Wormwood Scrubs Park! This was potentially great news, as we now had an intact device to work with – if the EXPO could or would dismantle it manually. This was the subject of a long phone discussion between me and him, as to how he might go about it, if he was prepared to do so at all. As always, a decision entirely up to him, but he did do so and in the process got us a sample of powder from the improvised initiator, and the partially dismantled initiator itself. I really cannot speak too highly of what the EXPOs did (and do); it is often really dangerous work, but then hugely beneficial in terms of the evidence recovered, as against the ‘controlled explosion’ which is a much safer option but generally provides less really useful evidence. Although the yellow material of the main charge was not reacting at the time, as with the other devices the bulk of it was destroyed locally by the EXPO, but still leaving us maybe 100–200 grams or so for further testing. Which turned out to be crucial.
Meanwhile, in the trace lab, work continued apace looking for traces of HMTD. Separately, the improvised initiator and its powder had been delivered to the lab, and were being dealt with – a necessarily slow and careful process. Even though the amount of powder was only 5–10 grams, this is still sufficient to take fingers off hands, at the very least. So it took a while, but after another two days, this powder had been tested (not by trace techniques – this was a visible quantity so was amenable to other test methods) – and found to be TATP! As it happens, at the moment I had been told this, I had just seen Sarah L coming out of the trace lab – she had been taking a long (maybe two day?) stint in there working up and running samples from her cases. Only one case could be worked on in there at any one time, to avoid any possibility of cross-contamination, so people were taking turns in there. I caught up with her in the lab reception area – and told her the news. I’m sure that is the first time I ever heard her use the F word – several times I think! Being Sarah, it was both shocking and funny in equal measure, though I did try not to laugh, perhaps not entirely successfully. The point was, all that work she had been doing in the trace lab (and others before her on the 21/7 cases) was now just so much wasted time – they had been looking for HMTD. And it’s not just a case of putting the same samples down a reset machine – the samples themselves would need re-treatment to make them suitable for the different test.
On the question of whether the main charge material could be made to explode, we had now decided that the cartridge case test was not going to settle this, so we had to look for another approach. Well, there was another test that could be used, called a Large Scale Gap Test (from here onwards simply referred to as a Gap test), which is basically a much bigger version of the cartridge case test. Around 150–200 grams of test material is placed in a steel tube, which is stood upright on a steel plate. A small explosive charge is then placed on the top end of the tube and fired. All the fragments of the steel tube and plate are collected up and photographed, then the process is repeated with an inert material, such as sand, and also with a range of known explosives. Comparing the size of the fragments from the various tests gives a good indication of the explosive power, and type of the test material.
However, although the facilities to do this test were available at the Fort, they were not FEL facilities, so we would need the department that owned those facilities to do this for us. Now, this is not a trivial test, and takes quite a lot of organising and planning to set up, and hence would cause noticeable disruption to that department’s own programme of work to just drop everything and do this for us. Not that the individuals who would do the test minded, but their own management certainly would have had an issue with it.
So this was now time for Dstl management to step in and, having said that anything we wanted we only had to ask, I have to say they were as good as their word – no issues were raised, they would get right on it.
Great. Now maybe we could start to make some progress. Except that our samples had other ideas! Up to this point (prior to finding the intact device), although we had got rid of the bulk of the scene materials, we still had a few hundred grams of each, still sitting in the water we had put them in when they had been delivered in a state of some panic, smoking in the van. So, at this point we had enough to do the proposed Gap tests. And then, just about the time we arranged to do these, one of the FEL staff came into the lab, quite breathless, with the news that she had just come from the magazine where the samples were – and the Oval samples, which had so far been the only ones to not show any untoward reactions, had decided to join the party, and were now fizzing and bubbling merrily, even while sitting in their water-filled boxes! And, given all the circumstances up to then, I decided we would have to dispose of most of the rest of the samples, leaving just a few tens of grams in total – plenty for lab tests, but now not enough for the planned Gap tests.
So we finally got a lucky break when the intact device was found, within a day of us thinking we would not have enough for any Gap tests. Now, with that, and combining what we had left from all of the devices (not ideal, but the best we could do), we had enough for one test, and be able to leave enough for any lab tests we still needed to do.
And so, two days later, we had our result – the yellow material from the 21/7 scene would definitely explode, under the right circumstances.
At the end of July, this was the state of play: Three of the four bombers were in custody, along with the one who had abandoned his device. Their premises (at least most of them) had been found and in one in particular, plastic tubs, more of the yellow main charge material, and various other items had been found, firmly linking them to the 21/7 bombs. This was in addition to CCTV footage and fingerprint and DNA evidence on relevant items, so they were charged, on remand, and not going anywhere any time soon. We knew that the 7/7 bombs had been carried in rucksacks, and were made of a ground pepper and hydrogen peroxide main charge, with HMTD initiators. We knew that the 21/7 bombs were made with a flour (or similar material – NOT pepper) and hydrogen peroxide main charge, and had TATP initiators. All of which suggested that the basic design of the devices had come from the same original source, but that the two groups had been working independently from each other.
Also, just around this time, maybe just into August, I remember that the fourth bomber was arrested. He had escaped as far as Italy, but was arrested and held there at the request of SO15. I remember this because FEL was asked to provide some evidence in writing, about his alleged bomb, to support the SO15 request for his extradition to the UK. I can’t remember all the details now, but I’m sure Claire, who had the Oval Station case, actually wrote something for them, and I feel like this was yet another late-night request, so maybe I had to countersign what she wrote. At any rate, at some point thereafter, he was duly extradited back to the UK.
August – November 2005
This is where everything kind of faded from the public view, but for FEL it was where the hard grind of the mountain of lab work that had built up really began. By the end of this period, over 2,000 separate pieces of evidence had been submitted for examination, just in relation to the 7/7 and 21/7 bombings, but of course there was still the day-to-day work which came in on a regular basis, which also had to be dealt with. We had one bit of luck here – we had fairly recently lost one of our senior staff, who had gone to work for a forensic lab in Scotland. I got in touch with him, just on the off chance that he might come back for a while – I was thinking maybe we could come to some arrangement with his lab to ‘borrow’ him for a while. But it turned out that he was actually quite interested in returning full-time. Normally this would involve all sorts of bureaucratic hoops to go through, and take months, even if his lab was fully cooperative. Well, I think they must have been, but also our own management must have gone into overdrive, because as it turned out, he was back working in the lab by early August – which must have been the quickest re-employment of anyone in Dstl ever! Added to this, another of our staff, who had been away on secondment to another organisation, was snatched back and again, working in the lab by early August.
These two extra staff were a real boon to us, and everyone had been working lots of overtime, but it still wasn’t enough. The biggest bottleneck now was work going through our trace lab, which only had a limited number of relevant machines, and which, as noted somewhere above, was very limited in how many items could be worked on at any one time. And we were having to work to a court deadline of early November for committal proceedings – this is the initial procedure in setting up a full trial, where each side outlines its case, pleas are made by the defendants, and dates are set. This meant that at least interim statements would be required from the relevant FEL staff on their findings from all the (21/7) cases, by then.