London 7/7 deaths ruled unlawful
2011-05-06 13:01
London - The 52 victims of the London suicide bombings six years ago were unlawfully killed, a coroner formally ruled on Friday.
The verdicts, after a 5-1/2 month inquest into the worst peacetime attacks on British soil, came in a week that the United States said it had killed Osama bin Laden and London police chief Paul Stephenson warned that another attack against Britain could come at any time.
The coroner, Justice Heather Hallett, is also expected to make several recommendations for preventing deaths in any future such incident.
The inquest at London's High Court heard how the victims had been killed during an "unimaginably dreadful wave of horror". Four British Islamists - Mohammad Sidique Khan, aged 30, Shehzad Tanweer, aged 22, Hasib Hussain, aged 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, aged 19, - detonated bombs on three packed underground trains and a bus in the morning rush hour on July 7 2005.
As well as killing themselves and the 52 others, they injured over 700 people.
The inquest - which had to wait until all criminal trials of alleged associates of the bombers had ended - were the first public examination of the blasts and the events leading up to them.
Many of the victims' families have called for a full public inquiry into the events to establish whether the police and domestic security service, MI5, could have stopped them.
