London:
After more than five years of delay that have angered and frustrated the victims' families, an inquest opened on Monday into the suicide bombing attacks by Islamic extremists on the London transit system on July 7, 2005 that killed 52 people, and the four bombers, and injured more than 700 others.
The inquest, being held at the Royal Courts of Justice, an ornate neo-Gothic building in central London, began with the presiding judge, Lady Heather Hallett, asking for the names of the 52 people killed by the bombers to be read out. She then asked for a minute's silence in their memory, before pledging in her opening remarks that she would undertake to keep the inquest as open as possible while protecting Britain's national security.
"I will balance carefully the needs of national security with relevance and fairness," Lady Hallett said. "It is in the interests of everyone that these inquests are conducted in as open a manner as possible."
In a ruling earlier this year, Lady Hallett said she would go as far as she could to meet the demand of the victims' families to know why the country's security and intelligence services did not act to prevent the bombings on the basis of what they knew about the attackers beforehand.
MI5, the domestic security agency, has said it learned in 2004 of the extremist links of two of the four bombers before the attacks, including the man subsequently identified as the lead bomber, Mohammed Siddique Khan, and one of his associates, Shehzad Tanweer, but did not investigate further because they were peripheral figures in other inquiries.
The families' demands have echoed those of victims' relatives after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, but they have been amplified by the lengthy delay in holding the London inquest, which is the first public inquiry of any kind into what have become known in Britain as the 7/7 attacks. In the United States, the principal public inquiry into the September 11 attacks was conducted by a presidential inquiry known as the 9/11 commission, headed by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, which was appointed a year after the attacks and reported in May 2004.
In Britain, the delay in opening the inquest has been officially explained as necessary to allow the police and other security agencies to complete their own probes into the attacks. Part of the delay has also been attributed to an unsuccessful legal action by the widow of one of the London attackers for the inquest -- or, properly speaking, the inquests, since Lady Hallett's task is to inquire simultaneously into the deaths of each of the 52 victims -- to be broadened to include the deaths of the suicide bombers themselves. A judge finally rejected that bid last month.
The emotional context for the inquest, which is expected to last until next spring, was set early on by the inquest's own counsel, Hugo Keith. After warning the families that some of the questions raised by the victims' relatives may never be fully answered, he sketched out the circumstances of the attacks, in which the suicide bombers attackers detonated backpack bombs on three packed underground trains and one bus in a busy London square.
Mr. Keith said the bombs "detonated amongst the innocent and unknowing, indiscriminately killing and maiming passengers." "The bombs struck down men and women, the old and young, British nationals as well as foreigners", he said. "They had no regard to whether the victim was Christian, Muslim, a follower of any of our great faiths, an adherent to none. They were just traveling on the London transport system".
Lady Hallett, 61, said that she had not yet decided whether she had the power -- or whether it would be in the national interest -- to close any of the inquest sessions to the news media and the public. As at the last inquest in Britain to become a focus of attention on a similar scale, the long-delayed probe into the 1997 death in a Paris car crash of Diana, Princess of Wales, top officials of Britain's major police and security agencies, Scotland Yard, MI5 and MI6, are expected to be called as witnesses.
The 2005 bombings constituted the worst terrorist attack in Britain. Top officials of the country's security services have acknowledged publicly that the attacks exposed systemic weaknesses in their ability to spot and track terrorist threats, including manpower shortages and the sharing of intelligence between the various agencies involved. But they have said that urgent steps have been taken to correct the deficiencies, including large increases in budgets, manpower levels and the recruitment of individuals with the language skills and ethnic backgrounds to enable them to infiltrate terror cells.
But the upgrading of the security services, much of it invisible to the public, has done little to assuage the anger that is widespread among the relatives of those who died in the London attacks. Graham Foulkes, whose 22-year-old son was killed by one of the bombs that detonated on a subway train, said as the inquest opened that the relatives' fury had been stirred by what they saw as the security agencies' efforts to continue to hide behind a screen of secrecy about what they knew before the attacks.
He cited the case of Mr. Khan, the lead bomber, who was photographed by MI5 with Mr. Tanweer two years before the attacks, as part of undercover surveillance of another Islamic militant. "They knew he was a bomber, and they knew his intent," Mr. Foulkes said. "So I want them to be decent, honest and straight with me."