20 years after London’s deadliest bombings, extremist threat grows more complex

On the morning of July 7, 2005, London was in celebration mode. The city had just secured its bid to host the 2012 Olympics.

“The UK is a cynical place, and suddenly something positive happened for once. It was like this happiness, I suppose, especially when you saw all the newspapers on the trains,” Mustafa Kurtuldu told The World.

Kurtuldu was 24 years old at the time. That morning, he boarded the tube at London’s Liverpool Street Station. He was running a nonprofit design agency and was headed to central London to give a talk. Around 9:00 a.m., he said he heard a loud popping noise.

“Like if you get a juice carton and you blow it up and you step on it, it was that kind of popping sound,” he explained. “But the train lifted off the tracks. At first, I thought we’d gone over something, and then the lights went out, and slowly, smoke started filling in.

Over the next hour, it emerged that two more bombs had also exploded on the London underground. Then, a fourth device was detonated on the top deck of a bus.

“I remember getting out, seeing the bus in front of me that looked like someone had taken a can opener to the top of it,” said Maria Lovegrove, a former detective chief superintendent with London’s Metropolitan Police. “And seeing people with really devastating injuries and just the sort of look on people’s faces of shock.”

Back on the Underground, Mustafa Kurtuldu managed to make his way to the last carriage of the train and jump down onto the tracks.

Later that morning, police announced that London appeared to be at the center of a terrorist attack. 

In the following months, it was revealed that two of the perpetrators had been on the radar of MI5. But the British security service didn’t consider them to be a high enough risk to justify further investigation.

Lovegrove said relations between local police and the intelligence agencies have significantly improved since then. She went on to lead Prevent — the police arm of the UK’s counter-extremism program.

The problem today, she said, is that extremist groups are far more diverse than before.

“We continue to see the persistence of Islamic extremism, but we also see an increasing rise in extreme right-wing terrorism, and people supporting others and showing an interest in other violent ideologies,” she said.

Rashad Ali, a counterterrorism practitioner in the UK, said someone prone to violence can now go online and pick and choose a grievance or an ideology that they can then use to justify an attack.

“The challenge is convincing tech platforms to remove the hateful content,” he said. “I regularly find material and report very extreme racist material. They will often come back saying that this material doesn’t contradict their rules of social interaction on the platform.”  

Ali said you can’t ignore the political reality of the world we’re living in. Major conflicts like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza can easily be used by extremist groups to fuel anger.

“The narrative framing is that these are things that Western states as a whole either don’t care about, support, or turn a blind eye to,” Ali said. “It creates a dynamic which says radical action is required.” 

Lovegrove said fighting extremism is not something police can do alone.

“Parents need to be more vigilant in thinking about what their children are doing and what they’re accessing online. We need tech giants to be responsible,” she said. “It’s a whole societal challenge and an international one.”

On Monday, a memorial service was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The names of all of those who died in each of the explosions were read out, but survivor Mustafa Kurtuldu didn’t attend the service. He said he can no longer face going to memorial events.

“I used to go to the memorial in Hyde Park, but then I’d just break down in tears, like just every single time. Then my wife said, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re hurting yourself. This is not helping.‘”

Instead, Kurtuldu spent the day with his wife and children, and their two kittens, “just doing everyday things together,” because that is what helps him get through days like this.