21/7: The Story Of The Bungled UK Terror Attack

A smell of burning rubber. Three rucksacks full of explosives ditched at Tube stations. An hour later, the same on an east London bus.

Four young men on the run, unleashing the biggest police manhunt in British history.

It was 21 July, 2005. Britain was still reeling from an al Qaeda suicide bomb attack that killed 52 people in the worst terrorist atrocity the country has ever seen.

Exactly two weeks on, an identical attack had been launched on identical targets: three Tube trains and a London bus.

Unlike 7/7, however, when the terrorists tried to set them off, the detonators ignited but the explosives did not.

At that point, passengers on those trains and the bus had no way of knowing that they owed their lives to a breakdown in communication between the terror gang and their master.

Ringleader Muktar Said Ibrahim and his three accomplices had prepared the explosives along the same lines as Mohammed Sidique Khan and his fellow 7/7 bombers.

The crucial difference between the two was a lack of technical support.

When Khan and his gang ran into problems preparing their weapons of mass murder, they received a helping hand from Rashied Raouf, al Qaeda's key operational co-ordinator for both plots.

Raouf remained in close contact with the four-man 7/7 cell in the UK throughout the process of making the bombs, and continued to encourage them until the moment they launched their attacks.

But when Ibrahim, his other protégé, returned to the UK he stopped communicating, an after-action report compiled by Raouf later revealed.

As he had been taught, Ibrahim assembled his four-man kill team and built the bombs.

All he lacked was the guidance to get them to work properly.

It was later said in court that had they gone off, dozens of people would have died.

Raouf was the link man in Pakistan between British volunteers and al Qaeda and was a key player in several plots against his home country.

The son of a baker, he fled the UK following the murder of his uncle.

He then married the sister-in-law of Maulana Masood Azhar, the head and founder of Jaish Mohammed, a Pakistani jihadi group, and quickly rose through al Qaeda's ranks.

He is "credited" with discovering Khan and fellow 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer in Pakistan, who at the time were intent on martyring themselves over the border in Afghanistan.

Instead, he helped turn them back on Britain, with devastating consequences.

"We know from documents that have emerged from al Qaeda itself that the sort of handler of the two [Raouf] when they were travelling around Afghanistan/Pakistan these two individuals had been identified to him by other people ... to look out for," said Raffaelo Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

"When he initially approached them they expressed a desire to launch, to fight and die in Afghanistan. This was sort of their goal.

"He then introduced them to another leader of al Qaeda who instead seemed to have persuaded them that actually their duty was going to be more use was to return back to the United Kingdom and launch an attack and then we start in motion the process of the 7/7 attack."

Raouf was later implicated in the plot to blow up airliners using liquid explosives targeting 1,500 passengers by a cell of followers from High Wycombe and London.

He was held in jail in Pakistan but mysteriously escaped without effort.

Ibrahim, Yassin Omar, Ramzi Mohammed, and Hussain Osman were caught, tried and jailed for life with a minimum term of 40 years for the failed 21/7 plot in 2007.

Raouf was reported by his family to have been killed in a drone strike the following year.

However, his after-action report could, perhaps, now explain the lower-tech approaches to terror followed in the Mumbai massacres and lately with the brutal murders of 38 tourists in Tunisia.

Bombs are complicated. Guns are not. With enough ammunition, one man can attract the attention of the world, and possibly cripple an economy.