A couple of months ago in Louisville, Kentucky, at the big gun show there, I noticed the same phenomenon: eighty or ninety percent of the men visiting gun shows have chronic hearing disabilities. I wonder why?

July 8, 2005 (Friday)
Birmingham (Alabama)

THE scene of carnage beneath King's Cross station (once again, because there was a terrible Tube train fire there some years back) does not bear thinking of: The train moving off and gathering speed into the tunnel, then one of the carriages exploding, acting like a stopper wedged into a bottleneck, bringing everything to a shuddering halt with every carriage behind it, each weighing perhaps fifty or a hundred tons with its passengers, thudding into the mess up front.

Now they have to unravel the mess, straighten out the concertinaed and corrugated carriages, all this done in a steam heat hundreds of feet underground, and pluck the already putrefying bodies out of the wreckage. The presence of hundreds of rats attacking the human remains is already a problem for the salvage teams, and the tunnel is considered to be in danger of collapse.

At one pm I phone London from a baking hot car park in Birmingham, Alabama, where I am waiting to go into the gun show; Jessica, 11, answers. She sounds very blasé about it all. I was never in any worry about her mother, as Benté has refused to descend to the Tube for many years.

I run my theory past Jessica -- I have been thinking over the sequence and timing of events, the westward trend of the incidents, and studying the maps a bit, and it seems likely to me that there was one perpetrator and that he (or she) is already dead in the wreckage of the No. 30 doubledecker bus.

If it was truly an al-Qaeda terrorist spectacular, like their coup in Madrid, their tendency has so far been to carry out multiple simultaneous blasts, to emphasize their organizing ability. Sounds to me like a one-man effort. If the police end up with the remains of one body from that bus which nobody claims, then perhaps they already have their perpetrator.

The pattern of blasts suggests one passenger changing from train to train, starting off with a load of forty pounds of bombs, dropping off one in each train, and then boarding a bus carrying the remaining explosives which either accidentally or purposefully blew up with the bomber. At least one box from Hackney, in east London, with a Muslim shop address has been found in the bus ruins.

Notwithstanding the announcement by one hitherto unknown al Qaeda group, I am sure that the British authorities are keeping their minds open about the bombers. See how eager the Spanish Government were to seize on the ETA as the culprits there, as it was politically opportune, until the al Qaeda connection became clear beyond peradventure! This time it may be the other way around.

Questions remain: Why would a Muslim terrorist have detonated a bomb at Edgware Road station, the most heavily Arab-populated area of London? The IRA have had much cause to be disaffected with Tony Blair in recent months. It is not a sign of ignorance to start of with an open mind, but of prudence.

TOWARD two pm I ask an elderly couple parking a neighboring car and unpacking guns-shaped bags what time Gun Show opens. The man cups his hand behind his ear, and asks me in a hoarse voice to repeat the question. After the fifth attempt I give up. A couple of months ago in Louisville, Kentucky, at the big gun show there, I noticed the same phenomenon: eighty or ninety percent of the men visiting gun shows have chronic hearing disabilities. I wonder why? 

 

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