Like almost all the great cities of the world London is built on a river but, unlike most other cities, it is also to some extent divided by the tidal waterway that runs through its heart. With few exceptions, the ‘best’ districts in the capital city, areas with names like Belgravia, Chelsea, Knightsbridge, Mayfair and of course Westminster, the seat of the government of the United Kingdom, are all located on the northern side of the river. In this half of London, property prices are higher, the buildings are more elegant and the streets always seem to be wider and cleaner and prowled by more expensive cars.
To the south, the names resonate less well: districts like Brixton, Clapham, Croydon and Peckham, the last achieving enduring fame as the location of a perennially popular television comedy series that seemed to encapsulate the hand to mouth, cash-based, quasi-legal economy of one of the poorer sectors of the capital’s population. And many of these areas enjoy less than savoury reputations. In the past cab drivers were known to demand a higher fare if they had to venture ‘south of the river’ and especially if it was a late evening or night-time journey.
Those organisations and businesses that did, for whatever reason, establish themselves on the southern side of the Thames seemed almost unwilling to venture too far away from the river, clustering as close as they could to the waterway. The headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, popularly and incorrectly known as MI6, the building commonly referred to throughout the intelligence community as ‘Legoland’ and by certain other less polite epithets, demonstrates this perfectly. It’s located at the south-eastern end of Vauxhall Bridge and if it was any closer to the river it would actually be in the water.
But not everywhere north of the river enjoys the wealth and kudos of a district like Mayfair, and a good example is the north-east London suburb of Stratford, part of the old parish of West Ham. It’s been inhabited for the better part of a thousand years; the name Strætforda, a compound place name deriving from the Old English stræt or ‘street’ and ‘ford’ and referring to a river crossing, its exact location unknown but somewhere north of the present Stratford High Street, being recorded as early as 1067. The area began the twentieth century in a state of economic decline that continued to worsen with every passing decade. De-industrialisation had ended the district’s importance as a manufacturing centre, as a major railway hub and as London’s principal commercial dock area.
Then, on 6 July 2005, London was announced as the venue for the 2012 Summer Olympics, and what happened after that changed Stratford permanently. Because of the need to not only create world-class sporting facilities in the area but also to improve and update roads and transport links, and in some cases to create brand new ones, Stratford received an astonishing level of expenditure, totalling almost £10 billion, making the London Olympics the third most expensive games ever held after Beijing 2008 and Sochi 2014.
Leyton Grange Estate isn’t a part of Stratford but of the much larger borough of Waltham Forest. It lies north-west of the A12 that forms the northern boundary of Stratford, and north-east of Hackney Marshes, and is a primarily residential London suburb. The modernisation and gentrification of Stratford inevitably had an effect upon the surrounding areas, and despite the sometimes unfortunate connotations of the word ‘estate’ when applied to urban housing, the Leyton Grange Estate is a popular area to live for both owners and renters. Most of the older properties are solidly built mainly Victorian terraced houses, originally intended for single family occupation but in some cases now divided up into two or three flats to maximise their rental potential and overall property value, or converted into HMOs, houses in multiple occupation, where people rent single rooms, often with shared facilities.
Radlix Road, between Leyton Jubilee Park and Leyton County Cricket Ground, is fairly typical of the area. Quiet and prosperous looking, with newish cars parked on the street in the ‘permit holder only’ bays, it looks like the kind of area likely to be occupied by people in decent jobs who need fast and reliable access to London, and certainly not the kind of area most people would expect to find a terrorist cell.
Which, of course, was exactly why Mahdi Sadir, the Iraqi man who was calling himself Abū Tadmir, had chosen that location.
To protect his own security he had never visited the property, which was occupied by the four volunteers he had recruited soon after he had arrived in London, and he only ever met them in neutral locations at least two miles away from the house and never used the same place twice. Most of the recruitment had been done in advance by other people who were involved in some capacity with the large number of mosques in the vicinity of Stratford.
It was the usual routine. People sympathetic to the cause of radical Islam were asked to keep their eyes and ears open and be on the lookout for young men, and possibly young women as well, who might be aggrieved enough with the way that Muslims were being treated in the Middle East by the various occupying forces and who were sufficiently dissatisfied with their lives in the West that they could be persuaded to exchange their earthly existence for a guaranteed afterlife in paradise through the medium of an explosion or other act of terminal and murderous defiance. By becoming, in other words, a shahid, or a shahida if female, and taking an active part in the jihad, radical Islam’s war against the West. Once a suitable ‘volunteer’ had been identified, he or she would be singled out for special treatment, for their general dissatisfaction to be discussed and escalated and honed and eventually for their hate and resentment to be pointed in whatever very specific direction had been selected by the people who’d recruited them.
And for all that, for that ability to develop and nurture a home-grown terrorist presence, Sadir knew that the organisation he had to thank was – bizarrely enough – the British government, and two factors that had enabled domestic terrorism to take root and flourish: freedom of movement and political correctness.
Freedom of movement allowed students from around the world to enrol in courses at schools and universities in the United Kingdom. This was not in itself a bad thing, obviously, but what had worried British intelligence from the start were the students who vanished below the radar at some point after their arrival. The concern was that some of these now invisible students might be following their own agendas and could become either radicalised or function as sleepers. And political correctness and the even more insidious Woke movement made it difficult or impossible to get people in authority to listen to questions or allegations about individuals in case they were perceived as being racist or sexist or some other kind of politically unacceptable -ist.
The result was probably inevitable and entirely predictable. It has been reliably estimated by the British intelligence services that by 2020 there were at least two hundred sleepers in the United Kingdom and in the United States the situation was even worse. There, it was estimated some four thousand sleepers had taken positions in the core industries driving the American economy, places like MIT and Silicon Valley, and in the organisations supposedly working to keep the country safe, the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the police and the NSA.
Many of the sleepers were involved in one way or another with the computer industry because what they and their distant masters directing their operations had realised was that although conventional warfare was still going on in the perennially troubled Middle East and other hotspots around the world, the new battlefield involved mice, keyboards and screens rather than aircraft, armies and naval task forces. It was much easier to destroy an enemy’s capability to wage war by simply denying essential services like electricity or fuel rather than physically planting explosives to try to do the same job.
And for exactly the same reason, the vast majority of the sleepers had not the slightest intention of becoming shahids themselves – that was reserved for the cannon fodder, the lowest of the low in the struggle against the West – but many of the sleepers were extremely adroit at persuading other people that blowing themselves up or performing some other kind of violent action was the best way forward in their short and bitter lives.
When Sadir had arrived in the United Kingdom after following a complicated and erratic route from Iraq, a route that had included almost a year on the other side of the Atlantic carrying out the necessary preparations for the principal part of his planned operations, the Islamic recruiter working in the Stratford area already had six potential martyrs largely primed and ready to go. Sadir had sat behind the recruiter as each man’s commitment and motives were discussed and had selected the four men he believed were the most committed for the operation he had come to Britain to implement, the first strike, before continuing his journey to his ultimate destination.
Sadir had arrived with a fully developed plan to cause massive loss of life and catastrophic destruction to the centre of London, as well as the contacts and sources they needed and effectively unlimited funds to ensure that it would all work. He’d rented the property in Leyton Grange Estate to provide a secure base for his four volunteers. Then he’d briefed them collectively in a secure location and explained exactly what he needed each of them to do and when and how they were to do it.
He had kept his orders simple, easy to understand, and unambiguous. He had begun by specifying the target – the Houses of Parliament – and the means by which the attack was to be carried out: a powerboat of some description. He had set two of them to work combing the boatyards and looking for a suitable craft to steal, while the other two men sourced enough ammonium nitrate fertiliser to turn whatever boat they chose into a powerful floating bomb. While that was going on, he had taken personal delivery of a metre-long box made of heavy-duty cardboard from a man who had been vouched for by Rashid, the most senior elder back in Iraq, and who had introduced himself simply as a friend and a brother. Inside the box Sadir had found a somewhat battered but still perfectly serviceable Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle with two spare magazines and a box of a hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammunition, a lump of Semtex wrapped in brown paper and, in a separate bag for security, a blasting cap to act as a detonator.
Sadir had been puzzled by the fact that the two wires on the blasting cap had been twisted together and asked the man who had supplied the equipment the reason for this.
‘Surely they need to be separated to allow them to be connected to the battery?’
‘They do,’ the ‘brother’ had replied, ‘but only when you assemble the weapon. If you leave the wires separate there is a possibility – very slim but nevertheless real – that they could act as an aerial for some of the radiation that surrounds all of us all of the time from things like digital broadcasts, radios and mobile phones. That could allow a current to flow down the wires and trigger the blasting cap. That’s why we twist the wires together until you mount the detonator in the circuit. Linking the two makes a short circuit and prevents them acting as an aerial.’
The blasting cap had come with a page of printed instructions that explained it was to be triggered electrically in accordance with the wiring diagram on the page, and that it was a short period delay – SPD – detonator. Despite the name, which to a layman could have implied a wait of seconds or even minutes, the ‘SPD’ meant it would detonate only a few milliseconds after being triggered. The instructions also included directions for safely turning the ammonium nitrate fertiliser into a viable explosive and where the Semtex booster charge should be positioned within the IED for maximum effectiveness.
And the four men had done well. They’d managed to steal the boat they’d identified without – at least as far as Sadir knew – triggering any alarms at the marina, though undoubtedly the theft would have been detected within a few days, and the combining of the ammonium nitrate with diesel fuel and aluminium powder in a rented garage had been completed without a hitch.
Sadir had checked everything on the vessel before Hassan had steered it away from the derelict boathouse, including the assault rifle and, most importantly, the commitment of the two men who would be aboard it for its final destructive voyage. He had joined them for the salat al-zuhr, the second mandatory prayer performed daily by devout Muslims.
Prayers comprise the second Pillar of Islam, one of the five obligatory actions that Muslims are required to perform according to the conditions and teaching of their religion. The pillars are shahadah, the recitation of the Islamic profession of faith; salat, the five daily ritual prayers; zakat, the giving of an alms tax for the benefit of the poor; sawm, the requirement to fast during Ramadan, and finally the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.
All five of the men had already performed the first prayer of the day, the salat al-fajr, which is required to be completed before the sun rises. The second obligatory prayer is the salat al-zuhr, performed after the sun has reached the highest point in the sky at midday, and although when the five of them knelt on their prayer mats it was actually late morning rather than early afternoon they all believed this minor deviation from their daily routine was unimportant to Allah within the scale of the operation they were engaged upon.
As soon as the purloined cabin cruiser had begun its journey towards the heart of London, Sadir had left the other two members of the group to clear up any last traces of their occupation of the boathouse, while he had climbed back into his hire car and driven to West London and one of the airport hotels near Heathrow where he had already booked a room for the night.
He would remain there until it was time to report for his flight to America the next morning. He only expected to receive a single call from Hassan shortly before the culmination of the attack, a final confirmation that the mission was proceeding correctly. After that, he knew he would be able to obtain all the information he needed direct from the news media that would swarm all over London as soon as the explosion had taken place.
He would enjoy a quiet celebration in his hotel room that evening as he watched the events unfold on television. He would also be able to confirm the success of the first part of his mission to the elders in Iraq, though he had no doubt that they would also be watching the news media and expecting to see the results of the detonation and, bearing in mind the proliferation of security cameras throughout the British capital, very probably be able to watch the explosion itself being endlessly replayed and commented on by grim-faced newscasters.
He was certain it was going to be a particularly good evening.