Anti-terror police chief tells of 'grotesque' crime scene after 7/7 bombing

The former head of Scotland Yard's anti-terror branch has recalled the grisly task his officers faced as they searched for evidence left by the 7/7 bombers.

Peter Clarke, who visited the Piccadilly line attack scene, said of the aftermath: "I won't go into the details because it was grotesque. If you can imagine a bomb having gone off in a crowded tube train and killed 26 people, you can imagine what was down there."

Mr Clarke was at home dealing with a plumbing leak when he was told “something was happening but it was not clear what”. At 8.49am, three suicide bombers detonated home-made rucksack bombs in crowded rush-hour tube carriages with devastating results. The first reports were of a power surge on the underground network.

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He told the Mirror: “I immediately feared the worst. We had been away for a tabletop exercise the previous weekend only four days before where we had war-gamed the worst possible scenario that we could imagine. The scenario we chose was multiple attacks on the London underground. That was fresh in the mind four days later.”

Mr Clarke was in the back of a police car when news reached him about the fourth explosion in a bus at Tavistock Square. Mr Clarke said: “On the day the most important thing was the rescue operation. Forensic investigation comes second to saving lives, treating the living with care and the dead with dignity, is what that phase is all about.

“And then the crime scene investigation starts. Potentially there was life-saving forensic evidence to be recovered from the scene which could potentially lead to other terrorists, or terrorists who had escaped. We just didn’t know.

"A key point was were we dealing with bombers who had left the bombs on the trains and gone away and therefore be in a position to potentially attack again? Or were they people who had died at the scene?"

He added: "I went down to the Russell Square scene, the only scene I did go down to because I didn’t want to get in the way of the important work that was going on there. But I did want to be able to say, should I have come under pressure to get railway lines reopened, what was being done and why it had to be done and why I wasn’t going to compromise on the integrity of the forensic examination of the scenes.

"The teams were working in extreme heat, there was vermin all over the place and lots of human remains that had to be treated with the utmost dignity and care.”

The forensics team was told to look for body parts near the scene of the explosion near the scene of the explosion that could be identified as belonging to the suspects. "They came back as being identical to some of the people we believed to be involved," he explained. "Those body parts varied in size but they were not large."

That process took several days before it became clear that the bombers were four British citizens who claimed 52 innocent lives. Mr Clarke said: “Unprecedented. You have to ask yourself, what did they achieve? It’s been 20 years now. All that pain and suffering they caused, and death, what did they actually achieve by that?”