Parliament attack: With bloodshed on Thames, the terrorism lull ends for UK

Senior UK counterterrorism and intelligence officials cautioned hiatus from terrorism wouldn't last

It was July 7, 2005, that four Islamist extremists set off three bombs on the London Underground and another on a double-decker bus, killing 52 people, wounding more than 700 others and searing the date so deeply into the British psyche that it became known simply as 7/7.

Since then, the U.K. has been spared a major act of terrorism and staged Summer Olympic Games without incident, even as cities such as Paris, Brussels and Baghdad have been convulsed by spasms of terrorist violence.

Throughout the hiatus, senior U.K. counterterrorism and intelligence officials cautioned that it wouldn’t last, and on Wednesday, under cloudy, early spring skies in the British capital, their warnings were realized.

“This is a day we planned for but hoped would never happen,” said Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner for London’s Metropolitan Police and the force’s top counterterrorism official.

Little is yet known about the genesis of Wednesday’s attacks. Still, even before the bloodshed on the Thames, signs that London wouldn’t remain immune much longer to terrorism by Islamist extremists were accumulating bit by bit.

Police in London said last year they were increasing the number of officers trained to use firearms by almost a third, to 2,800, to enable the capital’s mostly unarmed force to respond better to gun-wielding terrorists.

Drawing on the lessons of Paris, authorities said recently they were strengthening their capacity to respond to simultaneous attacks by gunmen and suicide bombers. Security funding and intelligence staff were increased, border controls were tightened and laws were put in place giving authorities more leeway to conduct to surveillance.

But it was a rare speech in December by the head of MI6, the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service that, more than anything, signaled that the titanic, largely behind-the-scenes struggle to prevent another 7/7 couldn’t insulate Britain from terrorist violence permanently.

In his address, the spy chief, Alex Younger, informed the British public that the scale of the terrorism threat to the U.K. was “unprecedented” and that the country’s intelligence and security services had “disrupted” 12 terrorist plots since June 2013.

The 2005 bombings themselves marked the end of a period of peace that followed the end of three decades of attacks by Irish republican terrorists on London and other British cities, during which the Houses of Parliament and other symbols of British tradition and might were repeatedly targeted.

In June 1974, the Irish Republican Army planted a 20-pound bomb that exploded outside the Houses of Parliament, injuring 11 people.

Almost five years later, Conservative lawmaker Airey Neave, who managed Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to become leader of the party, was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army, which planted a bomb in the chassis of his car that exploded as he drove out of the Palace of Westminster car park.

The last major attack in the heart of Britain’s government occurred in 1991, when the IRA launched three homemade mortar shells at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s office. Two shells overshot the building while one landed in the back garden, and four people received minor injuries.

For all their experience with violence by Irish republican militants, British security officials have characterized the 2005 attacks as a watershed in their approach to terrorist threats. The blasts at three Underground stations and aboard a bus marked the first suicide bombings in Britain and the country’s first major attack by Islamist extremists.

The U.K. dramatically increased its spending on counterterrorism and intelligence, and within three years the budget for counterterrorism policing grew about 30% in three years to £570 million ($711 million).

Counterterrorism hubs consisting of police and intelligence service were formed around the country. Laws were amended to make it easier for authorities to prosecute people for planning attacks, distributing terrorist propaganda or attending training camps.

But while the U.K. had until Wednesday been free of attacks inflicting multiple casualties, the years since 2005 had not been entirely peaceful. In May 2013, serving soldier Lee Rigby was murdered by two British converts to Islam near Woolwich barracks in south London. And last year, lawmaker Jo Cox was stabbed and shot in the village of Birstall in northern England, a murder described by a judge as motivated by Nazism and by prosecutors as an act of terrorism.

A number of planned attacks have been foiled by the police. In 2012, nine men received prison sentences for a plot to attack the London Stock Exchange and other offenses.

A year later, 11 men from Birmingham received prison sentences ranging from 40 years to life after they were convicted of planning to carry out an attack even larger than the 7/7 bombings.

Until Wednesday, these prosecutions and other measures by British authorities succeeded in maintaining the peace.

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Jenny Gross contributed to this article.

Source: The Wall Street Journal