London:
On July 7 2005, shattering the morning calm on a weekday, four bombs tore through London's transport system. Three improvised homemade bombs went off in 3 different underground trains and one on a bus in central London.
Though police investigations were conducted then, now after five years and three months, an inquiry has begun into how intelligence systems failed to prevent one of the worst terrorist attacks in the city's history.
With this inquiry, a lot of unanswered questions would surface. Whether it was an intelligence failure? Could the Security forces have done anything to avert it? And, what lessons have been learnt to prevent this from happening again? Finally, families of those who die in the attacks will get these answers.
The inquiry is calling hundreds of witnesses including police officers, members of the public and senior figures from MI5. It took 100 police officers, combing through 18000 hours of CCTV footage, to piece together what had happened that morning.
Also, one of the most contentious points, that Md Siddique Khan the ringleader of July 7 blast, was under surveillance for a while before the attack and not pursued later, would be probed.
"There have been other inquiries in which MI5 has been absolved...but families want to know more... also whether the emergency services responded in the crucial one hour after bomb went off," said Justin Crump a security expert.
Among the extraordinary new revelations and information, it is believed that the terrorists originally meant to carry out the attack 24 hours earlier. The ringleader postponed plans at the last minute as his wife developed pregnancy related complications and he had to take her to the hospital.
Also, the bus bomber was originally supposed to get onto one of the underground lines but seemed to have had last minute jitters. Instead of getting on the underground he boarded a bus that blew up near Tavistock Square.
Top officials of the country's security services have publicly admitted that the attacks exposed systemic weaknesses in their ability to spot and track terrorist threats. They claim that these deficiencies have since been corrected.
The inquiry will give its report by spring 2011 and is expected to go into the details of circumstances that led to the deaths of each of the 52 victims and the country hopes that this will finally bring some sense of closure on what was the worst terrorist attack in Britain's history.